I’m an oddball. You know why? I graduated from college in 3.5 years! Yes I’m a bit of a nerd, and I’m really proud that I graduated early. Not many people seem to be able to do that, but I found ways to make it work so I KNOW it’s possible. So to me, graduating in four years sounds easy! Thus, I am dumbfounded that more and more college students are taking 5 and even 6 years to graduate. So why can’t more college students graduate in four years or less?
Studies estimate that only 40% of students are graduating in four years, with 60% taking six years. Let’s take a look at some of the causes and tips on how students can break this trend.
Parents Paying Too Much Or Too Little For Tuition
My parents have always been a financial mess. So I was actually quite fortunate that they managed to pay for half of my college tuition. I had to take out loans for the rest. Sure it was scary at the time thinking about the debt I’d have upon graduation, but it was actually a blessing in disguise because I felt directly accountable for my education. That put a fire under me and kept me super motivated.
If my parents had paid for 100% of my tuition however, I doubt I would have been as motivated to graduate early or even on time. When someone else is paying for everything, it’s all too easy to take advantage of that! College should be a time to start preparing for the real world and learning how to be responsible with time and money. When your skin is in the game, you try harder.
If my parents hadn’t paid any of my tuition at all, I may not have been able to graduate in four years or less either because of the upfront financial hurdles and having to take time off to work a lot of hours. That’s why it’s important to apply to as many scholarships, grants, and aid programs as you can if you have financial hardship.
Fickleness, Laziness, And Lack Of Planning
If you change your major too often or too late in the game, you have little chance of graduating in four years or less. When I declared my major, I stuck with it. I also read through the prerequisites and requirements like a paranoid person and jumped on the course listings every semester as soon as they became available.
If you transfer to another school that can cost you as well. Try to graduate from the school you started at. If that’s just not possible, at least find a school that will take as many of your credits as possible. Transfer students lose a lot of credits when they switch schools and you don’t want that to happen to you.
It’s important to plan out your college track actively as well. If one of your prerequisites is only offered every other semester or every other year, you need to know that and plan accordingly. And know what you’re paying for too. Every college is different. Some charge tuition by the semester or term, others charge by the credit.
I think a lot of students also think college is a time to slack off and that laziness costs them. You can still have a social life, have fun, and graduate in four year or less. I did! Sure I wasn’t as social as other people, but I learned how to manage my time which has helped me a lot in my career and personal life.
How To Graduate In Four Years Or Less
Now, I’d like to get into some tips on how to graduate in four years or less. Even if you’re already done with college, chances are you know a current or future college student or two. Help them get a jump start on their career and life by encouraging them to graduate early or at least on time. It saves money and shows employers that you know how to multitask, handle a lot of responsibilities, and take charge.
- Don’t screw up in high school! Take AP classes and get a jump start on your college credits. I took AP Calculus and AP Economics. Both were challenging, especially Calculus, but they taught me how to be disciplined before getting to college. And I got credits!
- Pick a major that you will stick with. If you change your mind more than once or really late, your decision is going to cost you a lot of time and money. Pick a major that is geared towards the career you want that is also hiring so you won’t get stuck without a job.
- Know what you’re paying for. Even if your parents are footing the bill, figure out what it costs and how charges are being applied. Be smart with money early on and you’ll go farther in life and have less stress.
- Don’t double major. Trying to double major in four years or less just isn’t feasible. Chances are you won’t need both majors anyway. You may be able to squeeze in a minor (I was only 2 classes shy of a minor) but most hiring companies are only focused on your major and so should you.
- Plan ahead and know your major’s requirements. You must keep track of the courses you need to take yourself. Pay attention to course offering frequency and tackle your prerequisites first! Don’t rely on anyone else to remind you or tell you what to take.
- Avoid transferring schools. Sometimes this is unavoidable, so try to find a school that will accept as many of your credits as possible.
- Take credits like you mean it. If you’re taking a light load and only going to classes twice a week, you’re going to have a really hard time graduating in four years or less. I was averaging 21 credits a semester while most of my peers were taking only 12-15.
- Save any fluff classes for your senior year. Get your core prerequisites done early. If you really want to take a class in something like bowling or pop culture, put it on the back burner. You don’t want to have to delay your graduation because you’re short on required classes.
- Study, do your assignments, and get good grades. If you fail, drop multiple courses, or have to take extra classes to raise your GPA, you’re not going to be able to graduate in four years or less. I only dropped one course my freshman year after 1 week, had part time jobs, participated in multiple extra curriculars, and still managed a 3.5 GPA.
- If you study abroad, get credit for it. I encourage everyone to try to study abroad in college if they have the means to do so. Just make sure you will get credit for it!
- Don’t take time off unless you have a true emergency. If you take time off from college it’s going to be tough to go back, and unless you make up time over the summers and with higher credit semesters, you’ll be behind schedule.
Because I graduated in 3.5 years, I really am disappointed that the number of students taking five to six years to graduate keeps going up. College tuition costs have certainly gone up since I was in school, so you’d think more students would be extra motivated to get out of school in four years or less but that doesn’t seem to be happening.
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I think one of the best suggestions is to attend a school that has a good track record of graduating students within 4 years. I can only think of 2 or 3 students in my year from my college who took longer than 4 years to graduate, and in some of those cases it was due to adding on a second major. One of the big points that helped this graduation track record was that we declared our majors at the end of the third semester, after students had finished their core courses and had a good idea of what each major would entail.
That’s a good strategy to have the major declaration near the end of the year to help keep the students sticking with one track. Very few students really know what is going to end up interesting them when they first start college.
I graduated in 5 years because the French system doesn’t allow you to take extra credits from the next year, and I was working to pay for it all. If you are smart with money it makes more sense to graduate 18 months early with a loan then make a graduate’s salary but since I couldn’t at least I incurred no debt.
That’s interesting they don’t let you take extra credits. Nice job paying your way through and not incurring debt!
I graduated in 3.5 years, by which I mean, I graduated in seven semesters instead of eight. I took one of those semesters off, so it took four “calendar” years.
I totally agree with a lot of your tips. I was obsessive about reading all of the prerequisite course requirements and making sure I was meeting all of the requirements in a timely manner. I mapped out every mandatory class that I was going to take, and had a strategy for exactly when I would take them. I rushed to register for classes as soon as possible. I also took AP classes in high school, and I tested out of one of my mandatory introductory classes.
I declared my major in the second semester, and stuck with it. There were moments but I thought that perhaps I should change my major, but then I figured “nah, I’ll just study that in grad school if I’m really still interested.” And, just like you, I graduated with a 3.5 GPA. I also had a minor.
The thing is, I didn’t think it was that hard. When I write it out, it sounds like a lot of work, but really it just took a couple of hours every semester for planning.
Glad to hear I wasn’t the only one who rushed to register for classes! 🙂 I remember being SO happy when I got certain classes that I wasn’t sure I’d get. I always had a plan B and plan C in case a certain class got full and I had to shuffle time slots around. Nice job graduating early!
I completed my degree in 5 years. I got my education allowance and tuition fee from my parents. Engineering degree in my country is usually 5 years and it is normally for parents spend everything for their kids education.
My original plan is to complete my degree early but due to financial constraint, I did not make it.
You are lucky that your parents covered the costs, especially since it took a total of 5 years for your specific degree. I think I would have gone crazy if I had to be in college for five years. I was so happy to graduate early and start working. Most of my friends thought I was crazy!
It took me 4.5 years – because I changed majors coming into my Junior year. Ended up with two minors, though, so every one of my credits was used for something.
My wife will be wrapping up in a couple of months, after 6 years. She switched a couple of years in, as well, but into a degree path that can’t be condensed. Those first two years allowed her to build a strong GPA that definitely helped her get into the program, however.
We both studied abroad for a semester and managed to get a full semester’s worth of credits while doing it.
Both of us paid for our own degrees, and managed to get enough grants/scholarships that no loans were taken out after the second year.
I love the idea of AP classes while in high school. Neither my wife nor I had many AP classes available at our high school, and only some of them would have actually been helpful toward a degree.
I would killed to be able to do 6 years of undergrad! It would have been one awesome party! Take 30% less courses every semester and really enjoy life.
Unfortunately, my parents would have kicked my ass if I took that long. Id also start feeling bad as my peers started getting jobs while I was still playing golf.
Glad to hear both of you got credit in your study abroad programs. And nice job paying all of your way through and getting grants and scholarships. That’s hard work! I bet your wife will be so thrilled to be done this Spring!
I graduated college one year early.
I shaved a year off my college education thanks to AP courses in high school. A lot of people in my school didn’t want to do this, or they would take the AP course, but not bother to take the AP test, or they’d take the test and not study.
I also had no problems with taking summer courses in college. For example I started college in the summer right after high school rather than waiting until the fall. Other people would never take summer programs. This was a great way to knock out some fluff courses.
The one thing I can say that drags on people is when there is a required class that you can’t get for some reason or another. Say it’s only offered once every other year, or the class size is so small that it fills up fast. But as far as I can tell, this is usually the exception rather than the rule.
Nice job graduating in three years! That’s smart you got a jump on college classes in the summer after your high school graduation. That’s determination! I can’t imagine taking an AP class in high school and not even bothering to try taking the test or taking it without even giving it a real effort. What a waste of a good opportunity! If I have kids I will never let them get away with something like that.
Now, the length of time it took for me to graduate was entirely my fault, but the program I was in would have been extremely difficult to graduate in under 4 years. The entire department only consists of about 50 students (actually making my school one of the largest undergrad Physics programs in the country), so most courses are only offered every other year to be able to get class sizes of 15-20.
Some of those courses were pretty intense, too. 4 hour group take-home final? We split the questions up into 6 two-man teams and it still took 4 hours to complete. Extrapolating, that was a 48 hour final exam!
Then of course, the teacher prep program (the most popular of the four tracks) had an additional 30 credits over and above what the Physics department required. I’m not sure how it works in other states, but in NJ, teacher prep is basically an undeclared minor.
Of course, when all was said and done, my last semester was kind of a joke. I needed one more course in my major and 10 credits. My other two courses were freshman level courses, easiest A’s I’ve ever gotten!
Some side thoughts: You got college done in under 4 years because of the AP courses in high school. The only AP course my school had that would have helped me was Calculus. The way my district was arranged, the path to AP Calculus started in 7th grade! Which was the year that I kind of lost my way a little bit. I fell in with the wrong crowd and my grades slipped; only year of my life until Calc III that I got less than a B+ in math class! Kind of funny when you think about it, that the length I took to graduate college depended in part on the friends I made when I was 12. How’s that for a tale of caution for the next generation?
Wow that is tough with those kind of restrictions on classes. I can see the benefits of small class sizes, but that sounds a bit weird that they’d be so limited on class size and frequency at the same time. You’d think with the pent up demand they would need to offer bigger classes. Could be their way of keeping students as long as possible to collect more tuition.
Yeah the math tracks to AP classes in high school really can be down near impossible if you don’t do well in middle school. My school was the same way. I think they did offer some summer school classes to middle school students but I can’t remember if higher level math classes were offered or not. Grades from our pre teen years really do imact our choices in middle and high school. Kinda crazy but true.
Maybe I explained that backwards. Since the department was so small that courses had to be offered every other year in order to build up demand to get a dozen students to take it. If a course like Advanced Lab was offered every semester, there would only be one or two students taking it at a time.
Ah ok yes, that makes more sense!
My wife and I graduated in 4 years. Although I paid for my children’s college, one of the requirements was graduating in 4 years. A 5th year would have been at their expense. They graduated in 4 years!
Your kids are lucky to graduate debt free. Nice job telling them you’d only pay for four years. It worked out well for all of you! 🙂
I didn’t graduate early, I graduated right on time. However, if I had the mindset I do not, I would have graduated a lot sooner. As you know I’m not a huge advocate for college. In my opinion too many young men and women view college as a place to “find” themselves which is all good in my book only if “finding yourself” didn’t come with a $60k-$100k price tag.
It really is hard to swallow that tuition is 60-100k big ones these days. Not everyone needs to go to college but it certainly can open doors and is a requirement for a lot of hiring companies. Perhaps some high school grads would benefit from six months or a year of internships before starting college to figure out what they want to study. It will just be challenging for high school grads competing for internship slots against college students.
I graduated in 3 years with my BS, but really could have done it in 2.5 years. The last semester of undergraduate I was taking all graduate courses, which helped me finish my Master’s in one year (technically, fourth year of college).
I completely agree with you on how to make it out of four years. By the time I graduate high school, I had more than 30 hours of college credit because I took AP and IB classes. I took 21 hours every semester. And I took summer community college classes.
I applied for any scholarship I could find.
If I could go back I would take a couple of fluff classes. I took a lot of classes on top of my regular major because I thought I would need them. They didn’t even really count towards my degree because I ended up dropping the minor, etc. I should have taken yoga, or tennis, golf.
Nice job graduating in 3 years! And getting your Master’s in one year is smart too. You had a nice chunk of credits from high school which really makes a difference.
Even though you didn’t take fluff classes while you were in school, you got your degree out of the way and now you can use your free time to learn how to play tennis, golf, and yoga without the stress of having to do homework afterwards!
My last half year of college was kinda a joke. I took advanced golf and Econ 400 something! But now that I think of it…. taking golf helped me win a ton of business down the line in my career, and having all that free time allowed me to focus my attention on finding a job and trading the markets.
I could have done 3.5 years, but then that would eat into the enjoyability of college. I LOVED college! What a place to have fun, study abroad, learn new things, and leave pretty care free so long as grades were in tact!
Not sure what’s up with the Super DUPER Seniors… those doing 5.5 years or longer. I can see 5 years, but any longer seems off, unless the Bank of Mom and Dad is paying. Then that makes perfect sense. Party on!
Sam
You graduated in four years, so that’s reasonable that your last semester was on the lighter side. And that’s pretty sweet that learning how to play golf ended up having a lot of advantages in your career.
Of the 5-6 year graduates amongst my friends, their parents were the ones footing the bill. Why the parents didn’t get on their case or stop paying after year 4 is unclear. If I have kids I’m definitely going to let them pay for a portion of their education to help them start building responsibility and strongly encourage them to finish on time or early.
My biggest regret was not taking golf earlier, like sophomore year. Golf 1, 2,
3 baby! The course was in high demand though.
I love liberal arts for the course flexibility. I couldn’t imagine being in a super focused school that didn’t allow me to explore different interest while young.