Graduating College?

As college acceptances are in and people are considering where to go, they are thinking about where to spend the next four years of their lives. Few of them realize that more often than people know, it takes longer than four years to graduation from college.

It’s a bit of a shocker, right? They are called “four-year colleges” for a reason. It’s supposed to take you four years to graduate. In fact, when I ran the CIRP Freshman Survey and we surveyed hundreds of thousands of freshman arriving at hundreds of colleges across the US, 88% thought they would graduate in four years.

In reality, only 49% graduate after four years. It’s such an issue that the US government routinely looks at the six year graduation rate as a benchmark. At six years, 62% graduate from college.

That extra 2 years for 13% of college graduates has a cost. First of all, tuition and related expenses for two more years is a big deal. Most likely you and your family only budgeted for four years. Second of all, the opportunity cost of being in the job market for two years has an impact as well. Not only are you using more money to go to school those extra years, but you are not making as much as you could if you had graduated and been working.

And by now some of you have done the math and figured out that if 62% graduate in 6 years, 38% do not. Close to 1 out of 3 students who start college do not get a degree. For those who have student loans, this is a big concern. We know that college graduates can command much higher salaries than those whose highest degree is a high school diploma. The people who are worst off are those who took loans for college, but left without a degree, and this cannot take advantage of that wage bump.

So it is really important when deciding where to attend college to look at how many people graduate within four years. It can make a huge difference in a place that supports a life long benefit, or that becomes a liability.