Only 25% of today’s college students live at a residential campus and attend school full-time; the rest are engaged in delicate and exhausting balancing acts, often juggling courses, jobs and family obligations while commuting to campus. Their schedules are often chaotic, changing every semester and straining relationships with employers. As a result, 40% of all American college students can only manage part-time enrollment, lengthening their time in college and increasing the likelihood that they’ll accumulate debt without earning a degree.
All across the country, the numbers tell the same story: most part-time students will never graduate. Complete College America’s Game Changers are designed to ensure this new majority can succeed in spite of their busy lives, and our strategies can make a big difference for part-time students. The greatest help we can provide is to offer greater predictability, especially when we consider many students have to work to afford school. Structured schedules – for example, going to school every day from 8 a.m. to noon or from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. – provide the daily certainty that allows easier job scheduling and removes the need for semester-by-semester negotiations with employers and child care providers. With structured schedules, many more students could attend full-time, doubling their likelihood for success. The CUNY ASAP model and the Tennessee Colleges of Applied Technology are great examples of structured schedules for students in certificate or associate degree programs. In both Tennessee and New York, where programs have been designed to specifically meet the needs of local communities, these structural reforms have led to organic cohorts of students. These cohorts have strengthened collegial relationships among faculty, provided powerful opportunities for collaborations among students and their teachers, and created a shared mission of success that prioritizes timely completion and better outcomes for students and their communities.
15 to Finish initiatives are also helping colleges around the country ensure many more students are on-track for graduation. Thanks to this strategy at places like the University of Akron and Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, the majority of students are now taking the credits necessary to complete on time.
While we see these successes at schools serving full-time students, we’re often asked if 15 to Finish can work for 2-year programs that primarily serve part-time students. The answer: absolutely. We recognize, however, that differing student populations require adapting how we approach these initiatives. For example, institutions serving large populations of part-time students should encourage accumulating 30 credits per year through year-round attendance with summer or winter terms.
Rather than accepting that part-time students do not always easily fit into the traditional systems and structures of a college education, we have to ask ourselves how we can change such structures and design initiatives to better support students in their path to completion. There may always be students who need to go part-time, but we need to find ways to lessen the number of those students who view it as their only option. The Game Changers provide the structure and predictability these students need to succeed.
