NC State held their commencement ceremonies this past weekend for the end of the 2017-2018 academic year. According to the university’s Instagram story, 5,915 degrees were conferred in the main ceremony, held in PNC Arena. Countless photos and reminiscent stories filled my social media news feeds over the course of the weekend, leaving me with a bittersweet feeling of pride, but also longing.
I came into NC State straight out of high school in the fall of 2014. Technically speaking, I, too, would have been one of the thousands packed into PNC wearing a red gown, with my family in the crowd. A four-year degree earned at a four-year institution in — you guessed it — four years. That’s usually how college works, right?
Instead, I was sitting comfortably on my couch at home, bearing the weight of one more semester of school before I’m finished.
I know that, rationally, there is nothing to be ashamed of in taking an extra semester or two (or three or four) to finish an undergraduate degree. In fact, according to an article published in 2014 in The New York Times, only 19 percent of full-time undergraduate students complete their degree in the expected four years. At state flagship institutions, the number is 36 percent — still well below 50 percent, let alone 100.
The article even goes on to state that, “The lengthy time to graduate has become so much the status quo that education policy experts now routinely use benchmarks of six years to earn a bachelor’s degree and three years for an associate degree.”
My own path to graduation was studded with a semester abroad where I took too few credit hours, a double major into which I CODA’ed late and fewer summer classes than I probably should have taken. Even so, my path is still more “conventional” than most, since I came to college right out of high school, and my reasons for graduating late can be attributed to not cramming enough credit hours into a semester rather than having to transfer from another school or withdraw for any reason.
College — and education in general — is commonly regarded as an equalizer of the nation’s population. No matter what your background or your future aspirations, receiving and completing your education is what will put you on a level playing field and the path to success.
In many ways, this is reflected in the reality that the typical college student today is more likely than ever to be a middle-aged individual working toward a degree after half a lifetime of working as it is a student directly out of high school continuing their education. However, as long as our education system is built on the idea of standardization, this equalizer is in fact just the opposite. That is, standardization implies conformity rather than equality.
Our education system primarily benefits those who are able to fit into the standardized mold of a student — age 18-22, neurotypical, pursuing a four-year degree to put toward a career. Those who fall outside of these “norms” — in age, mental health, degree paths or career aspirations — are automatically at a disadvantage in the way the education system is built. Not only is their education then seemingly not personalized, but the effort is often too much for the benefits one supposedly reaps at the end of a college degree.
In fact, according to an article in The Atlantic, students are more likely to drop out of or defer away from a four-year degree program if they did not enroll immediate after high school, if the student is 25 years or older, has dependent children or elders, is married or a single parent, is enrolled part time or works full time.
Ultimately, pushing the notion that one must graduate in four years with a bachelor’s degree is often off-putting to many, including students who want to go to school part time or students like me who are incapable of taking and passing more than 15-16 credit hours per semester while working and living on the side.
It’s clear that the myth of the four-year college degree has long since been broken. Yet there’s stigma attached to being a super senior, or to being a transfer student who “missed out” on those vital first-year experiences, or to being a student who went back to school years down the line. For this, a change in culture is necessary to make higher education a more welcoming and fulfilling prospect.
So, as I double tap on picture after picture of friends who were able to meet the four-year “deadline” and graduate this weekend, the bittersweet feeling of pride for my friends mixed with the knowledge of having at least one more semester left for myself persists. I can, however, rest easy knowing that I’m far from the only one whose path to completing higher education was slightly more winding, slightly longer than someone else’s.
Change in the college culture comes first and foremost from understanding that no one path is the right path, and that every path toward building a successful future — whether that even includes college or not — is a valid path to take. To the Class of 2018, I offer my sincere congratulations and good luck with your futures. Hopefully, I will be joining you soon enough.
