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Finish in Four

Universities are starting students on a four-year road to a degree.

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Kesia Ceniceros knows well the challenges of being a young Latina pursuing a university degree on a four-year track.

She graduated from Northern Arizona University in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree in ethnic studies, with an emphasis in business.

She started attending NAU just one week after graduating high school in 2003. She had recently been accepted into the NAU’s Successful Transition in Academic Readiness Program for first generation, minority and low-income students.

For five weeks during the summer before her freshman year, Ceniceros, a small-town girl from Yuma, lived on the NAU campus and took two classes, which earned her six course credits.

“I loved the program. It created my foundation for graduating in four years,” she said.

Ceniceros is an example of what universities like to see these days.

In an era of ever tightening state budgets, swelling student populations, diminishing resources, and increasing expectations for students to graduate in a timely manner, universities throughout the country are increasingly encouraging students to focus on graduating on a four-year track.

Arizona’s universities are on the band- wagon. The message they are sending is that cost efficiency is key. Every extra year a student lingers at a university means more strain on the school’s budget and facilities because tuition doesn’t cover the full cost of attending.

And, by graduating students in four years, universities can free up space for other students, project an improved graduation rate, and thus offer better performance and accountability, and allocate resources more efficiently.

Four-year graduation rates for Arizona public universities are slightly higher than the national average of 28 percent. The University of Arizona has 32 percent of students graduating in four years, while Arizona State University has 30 percent and NAU has 29 percent. The goal is to improve those rates, administrators say.

David Bosquet, NAU vice president of enrollment management and student affairs, said there was a time when the expectation was everyone would graduate in four years, but as society and students’ lifestyles changed, so too did the way they attended college.

Instead, students’ lives evolved into fast-paced tangles of school, work, and family obligations that put undergraduate degrees in four years out of reach for most, and increased the average time to graduation to five or six years.

Now the pendulum is swinging back toward the four-year graduation goal.