One thing you occasionally hear from governments is complaints about the inefficiency of post-secondary education programs. This is distinct from the questions around inefficiency of post-secondary institutions, which is usually code for “those damn profs are making too much money.” The argument about program inefficiency usually goes something like this:
“It’s an [X]-year program! Why are students taking [X+1] or [X + 2] years to complete. That’s inefficient! A waste of money! We need to get students through these programs faster! Why aren’t you institutions doming more about that?”
This argument is simple, straightforward, and for the most part wrong. It makes sense in a context like secondary school where a student is for the most part a full-time student. in that situation, longer times-to-completion pretty clearly equates to more government resources spent. But in a post-secondary environment, the argument is a lot shakier. It can be true, in some circumstances, depending on what you take into account. But not necessarily so.
For illustrative purposes, let’s use the case of a regular undergraduate or college student in a program where the student has a reasonable amount of freedom to select their own courses, i.e. the student is not required to move in lockstep with other members of a cohort. The issues are a wee bit different for grad students, for reasons I will get to in a second, but for the moment let’s stick to our model undergrad.
The key here is to understand that from the institution’s point of view, the cost of educating a model undergraduate student in any given period of time is to all intents and purposes a function of the number of credits a student takes. That is to say, that a student who takes three credits per semester is only going to cost an institution 60% of what it costs it to serve a student who is taking five courses, holding things like class size and materials cost constant. By extension, if it costs $X per course to educate a student and it takes 40 courses to get a degree, it doesn’t really matter how many years it takes to finish the 40 courses: the cost to the institution is exactly the same. The only way longer time-to-completions create higher costs is if students are a) repeating credits because they are flunking them, or b) if students are deliberately taking more credits than needed because they don’t feel like graduating. In those cases, the institution is probably on the hook for extra costs, though this is somewhat offset by the fact that students are still paying tuition for those “extra” courses.
Of course, the institutional perspective isn’t the only one we need to worry about. There’s also a government perspective and a student perspective we should also take into account. Students, it could be argued, suffer when they take longer to graduate: their entry into the full-time labour market is delayed, for instance, and so they forego income. Bad, right? Well, yes, if it’s involuntary. But it’s usually not: the most common reason students go part-time is in order to work and make more money in the short-term. The way our student aid system is set up, many students can’t get all the money they want/need from loans and grants, either because the weekly aid limits don’t reflect an individual students wants/needs or because their parents earn too much money and this disqualifies them from aid. So maybe—just maybe—the solution to long times-to-completion is for governments to pony up more money for student assistance.
(Of course, students may in fact just prefer working and having cash in the short-term, or they may prefer working to borrowing, in which case better student aid might not be a solution. See how complicated this is?)
The second question is whether there are some savings to government if students extend their study period over a longer space of time. To which again, the answer is no. There is not a single province that determines its overall post-secondary budget in relation to student headcount. There isn’t even one which determines the budget by full-time/full-load equivalency. Those numbers can affect how the post-secondary education budget gets distributed between institutions—that is, they can shape how the pie is divvied up—but they do not affect the size of the pie itself. So this argument doesn’t work either. I think the best argument you could come up with here is that longer times-to-completion lower overall tax revenues by keeping students out of the labour market for an extra year or two.
The argument with respect to graduate students is somewhat different and more complicated. There’s the heterogeneity, for one thing. Yes, thesis PhDs can take forever but at the Master’s level a lot of programs are already accelerated one-year or 8-month programs with low rates of stop-out. And even in the case of extended PhDs, it’s not clear that the university is a net loser; longer doctoral student enrolment doesn’t necessarily lead to greater use of doctoral students as TAs/Ras/lab employees, but it does mean that the average doctoral student so employed has greater experience and is thus probably more valuable than would otherwise be the case.
The biggest specific issue here, I think, is whether institutions are doing their utmost to speed up thesis PhD completion and thus get students into the labour force more quickly (that is, it’s an argument about reducing student opportunity costs, not saving governments money). To the extent there is a government savings argument to be made, its probably strongest at the federal level—faster degree completion would allow the tri-councils to reduce the number of years of support and thus support more students with the same amount of money.
To the extent institutional practices affect the total cost of graduating a student, it has to do with the number of credits attempted in excess of that required to graduate—that is, better counselling to reduce program switching, stricter PhD thesis supervision, and lower undergraduate course failure rates. If anyone wants to go after those issues, have at it. But apart from that, we should probably ignore talk about times-to-completion because it’s not clear that it’s a particularly useful metric for anything, let alone institutional efficiency. And even if it were, the solution would probably involve more government spending (on student aid) not less.
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I believe the other costs that need to be factored in are the plethora of student services, and physical plant costs.
With student services, there is a resource cost to the many soft supports as well as financial aid services, finance dept. queries, enrolment and registration assistance, etc. If a student is only at the institution for four years instead of five or six or more, it amounts to fewer total interactions and staff resources tapped.
With physical plant, in purely economic terms, the faster you can produce a product (a graduate) through a given facility, the more products you can generate in a given period, and therefore it could be argued your physical plant costs per product will drop.
Finally, from a student financial advising perspective, I think it can be well argued in the majority of cases that if students can complete faster, even if it means borrowing more, and get into a job with solid remuneration quicker, the Net Present Value of that future education increases. Which is to say, they’re better off not dragging it out while working part-time in a low wage job. (Recognizing that some bar tenders and the like are going to be making very good money part time, so then it’s just a function of getting on with life goals.)
Agreed. It is utterly irrelevant whether a student takes 4 or 5 years to complete a Bachelor’s degree. On the contrary, in programs which have the capacity to offer a whole slate of interesting and challenging electives, top students often take considerably more than the required credits to satisfy their interests and advance their education beyond what can be squeezed into 4 years. And talking about “squeezing”: Some of our programs are simply overloaded with requirements. Many of those requirements are there for good reasons. However, it is disingenuous to sell these programs as 4-year programs when they should rather be considered 5-year programs. What worries me most about this overloading is that we don’t give students time anymore to “think it through”. No more deep thinkers. You students just get that assignment done in time (and yes, as your average tunnel-vision professor who knows all-to-well that my lectures are way more important than all the other stuff that you should learn this semester, I take great pride in drowning you in my “very sophisticated” long assignments…).
Where completion times become difficult, though, from my perspective, is when a Bachelor’s student takes more than 6 years, or a Master’s student takes more than 4 years, or a PhD student takes more than 6 years to completion. It may not be the student’s fault. There can be many extraneous circumstances that can push completion times beyond that, the need to work being one common reason. However, potential employers do look at these completion times and they will try to decipher whether there was a really good reason for the delay, or whether this might be a possible indication for a lack of ambition or efficiency of the applicant. We cannot blame employers for looking out for signs of trouble before making an offer. Therefore it is incumbent upon us to find the proper balance between content, program requirements, and overall scheduling of academic programs.
Notwithstanding the criticism of system-immanent factors, reducing the need for external work through proper student aid (or through proper funding of universities for less need to rely on tuition) is the one most important topic in keeping completion times in check.
Longer time-to-completions can also create higher costs if students are heavy users of student services, which, as blog readers know, are growth areas for institutional cost.
I should think that taking longer to complete indicates either an avoidance of debt by students, and a commitment by the institution to life-long learning or, on the other hand, an institution where students are encouraged to pursue their curiosities. All of which are good things. Indeed, if students can’t decide what to focus on, that probably means that they’re intellectually engaged, and the university is being a university.
So that calls into question the validity of this metric, but perhaps of all similar metrics. Efficiency isn’t really a useful measure of an intellectual institution — assuming, that is, that it can be measured. General Motors’s management by balance-sheet is, in our context, at most a necessary evil.
If a student takes 5 years to complete a baccalaureate, and that extra time was spent in 4 terms of relevant, reflective and above all paid work experience via co-operative education, I see nothing wrong in that.