Son is too embarrassed to return to campus to finish BA as a 5th year

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The posters jumping in to say how rare this is at their “elite privates” and “top schools” are totally full of shit. Interestingly, not a single one gives any actual numbers.

Do you have any first-hand experience at a top private college which requires students to live on campus? You don’t see how this would elevate the embarrassment of having to return for a fifth or sixth year? Where as an older student at UMD or GW can take remote courses or just pop onto campus for exams and have a day job or something. Plus the largest universities have a huge presence of older graduate students. Not saying it should be totally demoralizing but these differences can certainly elevate the anxiety.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The posters jumping in to say how rare this is at their “elite privates” and “top schools” are totally full of shit. Interestingly, not a single one gives any actual numbers.

Do you have any first-hand experience at a top private college which requires students to live on campus? You don’t see how this would elevate the embarrassment of having to return for a fifth or sixth year? Where as an older student at UMD or GW can take remote courses or just pop onto campus for exams and have a day job or something. Plus the largest universities have a huge presence of older graduate students. Not saying it should be totally demoralizing but these differences can certainly elevate the anxiety.

What the hell are you talking about? I never said students taking extra time are treated as heroes on elite college campuses or should be proud of themselves. All I said is that it’s not as uncommon as some posters think, which alone should and no doubt does reduce the “stigma.”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The posters jumping in to say how rare this is at their “elite privates” and “top schools” are totally full of shit. Interestingly, not a single one gives any actual numbers.

Do you have any first-hand experience at a top private college which requires students to live on campus? You don’t see how this would elevate the embarrassment of having to return for a fifth or sixth year?

NP all I see is that there is an elevated need for this kid to do pushups until he quits being such a sissy, that's what should embarrass the hell out of him not what other people might say when he returns for a fifth year.

[Anonymous]

How many 5th and 6th year students are walking around Georgetown and Penn any given semester? Can't be more than a couple hundred.

[Anonymous]

Reading your post reminds me that it took me 6 years to graduate. It was mildly embarrassing but I would have been a lot more embarrassed had I transferred and not graduated from my original school! That’s what motivated me to keep going despite medical troubles.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I thought 5 years was close to becoming the norm.

Are the graduation rates published in USN&WR and similar college ranking sites still based on 4 years?

Not at top privates. Many kids are finishing early in 3 or 3.5 years. And a lot of privates also live together on campus every year, so it really sucks if you have to return and live off campus to finish.

Do the Ivies even offer enough online courses to finish your degree remote if you don’t want to move back? Imagine being a year away from a degree at Cornell, Brown or Dartmouth and you have to go rent an apt in those pretty obscure towns when you’re older than everyone.

Decade-old Ivy perspective: My ivy did not offer enough or even
any remote classes if you didn’t want to move back. I was one of 4-5 in my year to not finish, plus a couple of kids who transferred sophomore year or left for start-ups. One kid didn’t finish his senior essay, so he could submit that remotely and didn’t have to return. Another girl had done a semester abroad at a time when our school did not allow many transfer credits from other schools, so she had already planned on another fall term. And I came back because I was short credits. I would sit with study abroad girl in our assigned dining hall. I suppose we could have rented apartments but there weren’t many and it would have been a hard to apply our financial aid packages to them. Off-campus living was expensive and usually taken up by grad students long before we had known we’d need it.

I think it is very different post-Covid at my school. Many athletes and international students had to take time off so there is less of an obvious divide between classes and no more stigma about lingering on campus.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How many 5th and 6th year students are walking around Georgetown and Penn any given semester? Can't be more than a couple hundred.

How would anyone even know? Could be a grad student. Could be a student who took a gap year before entering college. Could be a student who took a covid semester.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I thought 5 years was close to becoming the norm.

Are the graduation rates published in USN&WR and similar college ranking sites still based on 4 years?

Not at top privates. Many kids are finishing early in 3 or 3.5 years. And a lot of privates also live together on campus every year, so it really sucks if you have to return and live off campus to finish.

Do the Ivies even offer enough online courses to finish your degree remote if you don’t want to move back? Imagine being a year away from a degree at Cornell, Brown or Dartmouth and you have to go rent an apt in those pretty obscure towns when you’re older than everyone.

If you are a returning student you can live on campus at many schools. There were 5th year students at my SLAC who lived in the dorms.

Dartmouth, with its quarter system, has people coming and going all the time since not everyone chooses to take the same terms off after sophomore summer term.

[Anonymous]

This is a fun table for the person who keeps demanding stats. I was one of the years with only 30 students not graduating within 6 years, and I can personally name 12 of them and give you the specific reasons why they didn’t return. They started their own companies, left to be LDS missionaries, were orthodox Jewish, got married and then transferred, and there was some Korean national service stuff:

https://oir.yale.edu/data-browser/student-data/degrees/yale-college-graduation-rates-w041

Of the ones who did not graduate in 4 years with our class but finish shortly after and counted as 6 year graduates, I think they were mostly study abroad kids. Yale used to not accept most study abroad programs for credit like some other PPs discussed, but some kids did it anyway and took on the extra semester or year.

[Anonymous]

I finished in 4.5 years in December, then I came back for graduation weekend in May to walk. I was at a flagship university where it was somewhat common to take 4.5 or 5 years because of such a diverse mix of students, scheduling conflicts, pre-meds taking extra time to prep for medical school, and many do a one-year graduate degree (e.g. accounting, engineering). Everyone lived off campus after freshman year, so I didn't have housing awkwardness. And for that extra fall semester I was able to keep working remotely for my summer employer, then I moved in January to start for them full-time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How many 5th and 6th year students are walking around Georgetown and Penn any given semester? Can't be more than a couple hundred.

How would anyone even know? Could be a grad student. Could be a student who took a gap year before entering college. Could be a student who took a covid semester.

Unless you're in all remote classes—which is not even possible at selective universities—how do you plan to be incognito? Younger classmates will see you on campus, will see you in class, you will be in their study and project groups—you may even have to live with some. You can't lie to yourself or to others. You are there to finish up your bachelor's.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How many 5th and 6th year students are walking around Georgetown and Penn any given semester? Can't be more than a couple hundred.

How would anyone even know? Could be a grad student. Could be a student who took a gap year before entering college. Could be a student who took a covid semester.

Unless you're in all remote classes—which is not even possible at selective universities—how do you plan to be incognito? Younger classmates will see you on campus, will see you in class, you will be in their study and project groups—you may even have to live with some. You can't lie to yourself or to others. You are there to finish up your bachelor's.

I think the PP was talking about recognizing someone from "walking around." But regardless you don't have to lie -- this is just so not a big deal. You're in classes with people of different ages, it's not like college classes are sequenced like HS, you likely have friends who were in years prior to you. I went to a selective small school with a high graduation rate and I remember there were a dozen people or so whose schedules were out of step with their graduating class--it was nice to have them around longer and get to know them better.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How many 5th and 6th year students are walking around Georgetown and Penn any given semester? Can't be more than a couple hundred.

A couple hundred isn’t nothing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I thought 5 years was close to becoming the norm.

Are the graduation rates published in USN&WR and similar college ranking sites still based on 4 years?

Not at top privates. Many kids are finishing early in 3 or 3.5 years. And a lot of privates also live together on campus every year, so it really sucks if you have to return and live off campus to finish.

Do the Ivies even offer enough online courses to finish your degree remote if you don’t want to move back? Imagine being a year away from a degree at Cornell, Brown or Dartmouth and you have to go rent an apt in those pretty obscure towns when you’re older than everyone.

Decade-old Ivy perspective: My ivy did not offer enough or even
any remote classes if you didn’t want to move back. I was one of 4-5 in my year to not finish, plus a couple of kids who transferred sophomore year or left for start-ups. One kid didn’t finish his senior essay, so he could submit that remotely and didn’t have to return. Another girl had done a semester abroad at a time when our school did not allow many transfer credits from other schools, so she had already planned on another fall term. And I came back because I was short credits. I would sit with study abroad girl in our assigned dining hall. I suppose we could have rented apartments but there weren’t many and it would have been a hard to apply our financial aid packages to them. Off-campus living was expensive and usually taken up by grad students long before we had known we’d need it.

I think it is very different post-Covid at my school. Many athletes and international students had to take time off so there is less of an obvious divide between classes and no more stigma about lingering on campus.

Sigh. Again, it was more tha. “4-5 kids”. That would make the four year graduation rate well over 99 percent, which no school has no matter how elite.

I don’t know why poster after poster after poster keeps offering these anecdotes in the face of the real life data that has been provided on this thread.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is a fun table for the person who keeps demanding stats. I was one of the years with only 30 students not graduating within 6 years, and I can personally name 12 of them and give you the specific reasons why they didn’t return. They started their own companies, left to be LDS missionaries, were orthodox Jewish, got married and then transferred, and there was some Korean national service stuff:

https://oir.yale.edu/data-browser/student-data/degrees/yale-college-graduation-rates-w041

Of the ones who did not graduate in 4 years with our class but finish shortly after and counted as 6 year graduates, I think they were mostly study abroad kids. Yale used to not accept most study abroad programs for credit like some other PPs discussed, but some kids did it anyway and took on the extra semester or year.

You “think,” huh? Some data that is.

The bottom line is that dozens of Yale graduates took more than four years to graduate since the beginning of time. That’s not “one or two,” it’s not “4-5,” and it’s not 12. It’s a lot more than any number being thrown around by anyone talking out of their a$$.