Who Has Time?

I’ve never really understood the academic calendar.

It’s sometimes called “agrarian,” although I’ve been told that in truly agrarian areas, it often has to be adjusted to meet the needs of harvest season. That suggests that calling the current one “agrarian” isn’t quite right, even allowing for the effects of climate change on growing seasons over time. (When I was a kid in the ’70s, my grandfather in Michigan had a large garden that was the remains of what was once the family farm. He grew corn every year and swore by the slogan “knee-high by the Fourth of July.” Now, corn in northern states is usually much higher by July.)

The long fall and spring semesters, with a long summer break, are well designed to screen out people who don’t have years to devote to full-time study. And they do. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many programs aimed at working adults break semesters into smaller chunks with fewer classes at a time. If you’re already juggling work and family, exactly how many classes do you want to juggle on top of that at a time? It’s easier to juggle two balls for a minute, then two more for another minute, than four balls for two minutes.

In the community college world, we’ve sort of known that for a long time. Course completion rates in January terms and summer terms are typically much higher than in the spring and fall semesters. Some of that may be a function of a higher percentage of visiting students, but when I asked the IR office at my college to filter out the visiting students, the effects still held. And it’s not just here.

When I’ve heard presentations on shorter semesters, the usual takeaway is that they had positive effects on completion, retention and graduation, but the improvements were greatest among groups of students who typically struggle. The students who thrive in the traditional structure thrive about equally in the shorter one. But many who have more complicated lives -- lower incomes, more family demands, more hours in paid work and the like -- benefit disproportionately. Having fewer balls to juggle matters more when school isn’t the only thing you’re doing. That’s probably why the idea is catching on among the Achieving the Dream schools.

The academic calendar is one of the few variables that institutions control directly. We don’t control the high school experiences that students have, or their family lives, or their jobs. We don’t control the larger political climate, as we’ve been reminded recently. We don’t control pandemics, recessions or politicians. But we do control the academic calendar.

The control isn’t perfect, of course. Financial aid, for instance, sets parameters either explicitly or through the sheer hassle of trying to scale manual workarounds. (This factor is massively underestimated in the popular discussion of all sorts of reforms.) Certain kinds of internships tend to be more common in the summer. Sports teams have to follow the schedules for their leagues.

When I worked at DeVry, it had a 12-month teaching calendar broken into three four-month semesters. (They started in July, November and March.) The calendar was a selling point; Admissions used to tell prospective students that if they finished eight semesters in three years, they’d save the opportunity cost of a full-time salary in the fourth year. That was true, as far as it went, but even with that selling point, enrollment was notably lower in the semester that started in July than in the others.

Accelerated completion has long been available to students who are able to take January and summer classes, especially if they came in with AP or dual-enrollment credit. Some schools have gone to an entirely competency-based model in which time becomes the dependent variable and learning becomes the independent variable. There’s merit to that. If you’re going to stick with credits, though, the usual number for a bachelor’s degree is 120. DeVry had no shortage of flaws, but it stuck to that model; it just built a schedule in which it was expected that students would complete 45 credits per year.

Last week’s Inside Higher Ed story about three-year bachelor’s degrees featured colleges exploring a very different option. They discussed simply dropping the number of credits from 120 to 90, thereby allowing students to finish in three years without having to take more than 30 in a year.

That’s … different.

Rather than a more accessible form of delivery or a different way of measuring achievement, that model proposes keeping the credit hour but requiring 30 fewer of them. It’s dilution. Even DeVry -- a for-profit -- didn’t do that. The idea is cost savings, but it’s cost saving at the expense of watering down the product. (The trendy new term for that is “skimpflation.”) I’m happy to look at different ways to divide time, or even to get away from time as a measure altogether. But if we’re going to stick with time-based measures and the usual calendar, then just lopping off a year is, well, just lopping off a year.

We know who succeeds in the “agrarian” system. We know who would likely survive a dilution of the product. We know, too, who would likely suffer. We can use control of the academic calendar to benefit those who already benefit the most, or we can use it to enable talent currently buried under the stuff of life to shine. We know who has time, and whose time is already stretched. When we choose a calendar, we have to decide what time it is.