UNC targets 6-year degree

"College: The best five or six years of your life."

The tacky T-shirt slogan is funny because it's true.

About 14 percent of students who enrolled in UNC-Chapel Hill in 1997 took five or six years to earn their degree.

That's not how it was in Nelson Schwab III's day.

"We've allowed a culture to exist that says it's OK to graduate in six years," said Schwab, chairman of the UNC-CH board of trustees, at a meeting Thursday.

Schwab and many of his colleagues want to see more done to get students to graduate in four years, as Chancellor James Moeser begins pushing strategies to improve the graduation rate.

The issues are tied but not tightly, said Jerome Lucido, UNC-CH's vice provost for enrollment management and director of undergraduate admissions.

Students drop out or take time off from school for many reasons: family commitments, extended internships, etc.

Some need the extra year or two, but most don't, Lucido said.

He and other administrators want to offer expanded services to help students stay in school and get out when it's time.

"We need to move to the next step of really assessing what it takes to get them through here with the kind of experience they want in an efficient period of time," Lucido said.

About 83 percent of UNC-CH students who enrolled in 1997 graduated within six years. (About 6 percent transferred to other schools. An additional 10 percent neither graduated nor transferred.)

That's high compared with most public universities. Sixty-three percent of N.C. State University's 1997 freshman class graduated within six years. Only about half of N.C. Central University students during that time period received their degrees.

But UNC-CH lags behind its "peer institutions," such as the University of Michigan, University of Virginia and University of California, Berkeley.

Lucido, who will make a presentation to the trustees in March, said UNC-CH probably can't catch Virginia's 92 percent rate. "But we can make some progress," he said.

Lucido said he wants to expand the Summer Bridge program, which offers remedial courses for students coming from "less powerful high schools."

And he wants more advisers to help students in crisis, guiding them toward manageable course loads that play to their strengths.

"We already do a good job here," Lucido said. "We just want to step up to the very highest level."