No More Five Year Plans

From an the Baltimore Sun, the University of Maryland system is searching for ways to free up classroom space in an already overcrowded system by pursuing the radical idea of getting students to graduate in 4 years.

For a student to get 120 credits in four years (the minium required for graduation), a student would have to take 15 credits a semester or roughly 4 to 5 classes as semester to graduate in four years. Here are some of the ideas being kicked around:

Add a penalty to tuition for each credit over 132.
Encourage students to take 12 credits or nearly a semster's worth of work via internships or online courses. (more on this later)
Freshmen who enroll in the spring will be encouraged to take 12 credits online or at a community college.

Of course, onesolution would be to make the minimum course load for full-time students be 15 credit hours a semester, or alter the manner in which part-time students are taught. But that would be logical and logic and higher education don't necessarily mix.

Now the issue of internships is a tricky one for me. I believe in the value of internships to put the academic work a student has done into real world environment. Further, internships provide contacts for future employment. But too often internships turn out to be little more than cheap labor for the company/organization bringing the internship in. Care must be taken in internship organizations to ensure that the work done by interns is relevant to their education. While a certain amount of scut work should be anticipated, the bulk of an internship needs to be substantive learning.

One regent has this comment: "Regent Joseph D. Tydings said he believes the policy encouraging students to take nontraditional courses could help them after they graduate. Tydings said he hopes professors would work with their students to find internships that could lead to jobs."

He "hopes professors" would help students with internships. While I have no doubts that some professors would help, unless you make it part of their job, some professors will not help. I also fear that schools will try to expand internships for credit because of the sheer economics of the matter, i.e. they get money for the tuition without significant classroom/professorial time, meaning a higher profit margin. The employers get free labor and the student does get something--we hope.

There are several other issues raised by the proposal. One of which is the concept of red-shirting athletes. Under the red-shirting policies, schools may place a student-athlete on a red-shirt, which allows the athlete to not lose a year of eligibility, but still train and workout with the team. This usually means that such students would be on a five year plan, particularly because for most student athletes, they only take 12 credits during the sports season.

The schools will have to address this issues and others in any plan that places a premium on four year graduation.

baltimoresun.com - UM system tells students to hustle through