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Appendix D: So They Got a Degree!
Why Did It Take So Long? Or Did It?

Both public mythology and public policy are grounded in a belief that a bachelor's degree should be earned within four academic years from the time a student first enrolls in higher education. The four-year benchmark is a standard that assumes continuous enrollment and full credit loads. It derives from a period when relatively few people delayed entry to college to a point in life when they already had families and jobs, and when relatively few transferred from 2-year to 4-year colleges--let alone engaged in any other multi-institutional attendance behavior. Most institutions express the contents of that four-year period in the currency of credits though credits serve far more as proxies for time than content. The result is both a national accounting system and a basis for state funding of public institutions. It is natural for those who plan state budgets to worry about time-to-degree.

The empirical account of time-to-degree is very different from the normative assumption, and only the long-term longitudinal studies of the National Center for Education Statistics can determine that time accurately. No other data bases can do it, and no other evidence is as powerful as 11 or 12 year transcript records, often from two or more institutions in two or more states. The empirical account, measuring elapsed time to degree (including periods of stop out, terms of light credit loads, portfolios of credits that were not wholly accepted in transfer--in other words, real life stories), clearly say that the five-year bachelor's degree has been the norm since the 1970s. For the generation of the NLS-72 (1972-1984), the mean elapsed time to degree was 54.5 months; for that of the HS&B/So (1982-1993), the mean elapsed time increased to about 57 months. In either case, that's five full academic years.

But there is a different question raised by the multivariate analyses through which we have just passed, and it is a question that should prove very helpful to state, regional, and national planning. Which of the factors that help explain the variance in bachelor's degree completion also enlighten our understanding of time-to-degree. Table D1 provides a descriptive exploration of some key variables in pre-collegiate background and attendance patterns in relation both to time and GPA.

Table D3 provides another common and common-sensical account of time-to-degree in the two cohorts of the NLS-72 and the HS&B/So, namely by undergraduate major field and credits earned. This table is slightly different from table D1 because it is not restricted to students for whom a GPA can be computed. In both cohorts, it is obvious that students earning degrees in engineering take longer to do so and earn correspondingly more credits in the course of their undergraduate careers. Since engineering (and architecture, which is included in the same category) programs often require a cooperative semester, these results are not surprising. Education and health sciences/services (nursing, allied health, clinical health science, HPER, etc.) majors in the HS&B/So cohort, however, took much longer to finish degrees and earned significantly more credits than did their counterparts a decade earlier. This change should be subject to further investigation.

Table D1.–Mean elapsed time to bachelor's degree and final undergraduate GPA, by key analytic variables, High School & Beyond/Sophomore cohort, 1982-1993

NOTES: (1) Universe consists of all students who earned a bachelor's degree by 1993, and for whom postsecondary transcripts were received and contained sufficient information to determine elapsed time to degree and undergraduate GPA. Weighted N=806k. (2) Elapsed time is measured in calendar years from the first term of attendance at the "referent" first institution of attendance. (3) Standard errors adjusted by the design effect. Simple s.e.=.675; Taylor series s.e.=1.042; Design Effect=1.54. SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics: High School & Beyond/Sophomore cohort, NCES CD#98-135.

At first blush, what we see in table D1 appear to be more confirmations of common sense. First, the number of institutions attended may not be a significant factor in explaining degree completion, but among those who complete degrees, the more institutions, the longer it takes. Second, after the highest quintile of SES, there is no clear relationship between family background and either time-to-degree or final GPA. Third, the variables that contribute most to explaining bachelor's degree completion, academic resources and continuous enrollment, are strongly related to completing degrees in short order. Particularly impressive is the apparent linear relationship between the quintiles of pre-collegiate academic resources and both time-to-degree and final GPA.

Table D2.–Factors accounting for completion of a bachelor's degree within a modified traditional time span, High School & Beyond, Sophomore Cohort, 1982-1993

Universe: All students who completed a bachelor's degree, whose transcript records were complete and contain sufficient information to compute time-to-degree and undergraduate GPA. N=3,386. Weighted N=806k. Simple s.e.=.675; Taylor series s.e.=1.042; Design Effect=1.54.

The second blush suggests that a multivariate approach to time-to-degree might tease out the true strengths of competing notions. For this purpose the benchmark became the median elapsed time to degree for this cohort, 4.24 calendar years, a figure that translates into about 4.5 academic years. The general form of the question is what background variables, postsecondary attendance patterns, and college performance indicators count most for completing a bachelor's degree in less than median time? For purposes of casting a wide net for answers, the academic resources variable (ACRES) was deconstructed into its three components, and all the demographic and attendance pattern variables that were discarded from the models explaining degree completion were brought back. Given the large number of independent variables fed into a single equation, the selection criterion for admission from the correlation matrix was set to the default value of p<.05. With that setting, table D2 indicates that the following variables have no bearing on time-to-degree: high school class rank/GPA, high school curriculum intensity/quality, race, SES quintile, parenthood, educational aspirations, taking a loan for higher education expenses, and starting at a 4-year college. None of these met the criterion for selection.

Of the 17 variables that met the criterion of selection, only 8 survived in the simple least squares regression model. The only demographic variable in this collection, gender, indicates that males take longer to complete degrees, partly (but not wholly) because men are over-represented in fields where time-to-degree is longer by custom-and-usage, e.g. engineering and architecture.

Table D3.–Time to Bachelor's Degree and Total Undergraduate Credits, by Selected Major, in Two Longitudinal Studies Cohorts

Appendix C: Gradations of Academic Intensity & Quality of H.S. Curriculum

Appendix E: Example of a Customized National Long-Term Degree Completion Report