Raising admissions standards and charging a student who takes excessive credits will be two options the UW System Board of Regents will consider at its annual meeting next week. The options will be presented as ways to affect how soon students graduate.
About 40 percent of UW-Madison students graduate in four years, with the rest usually graduating in five or six years.
The suggestions as to how to further improve these numbers, which have been increasing in recent years, will be proposed through a report titled \The Quality of the Student Experience"" at the meeting.
Although no action will be taken, the report suggests that regents present a plan at their December 2002 meeting.
Frank Goldberg, UW System associate vice president for policy, said these sorts of actions result in a trade-off between quality in education and efficiency in terms of university spending.
Sometimes, Goldberg said, students stay in college for more than four years because it is ""desirable"" to them to take a couple more classes, for example. But then there are other students who stay for what he called ""undesirable"" reasons, such as not being able to enroll in classes they need for a major or just staying because they did not want to leave college.
""As we work to get students to graduate at the right time, we have to be very careful to make sure that we don't discourage the desirable behavior at the same time that we're trying to decrease what might be undesirable behavior,"" he said.
Graduating students in four years was an issue for the UW System by the early 1990s, when the entire UW System had hit a low due to, among other factors, unavailability of courses.
One result of student complaints on the problem was the creation in 1997 of a four-year contract students can sign, agreeing to conditions such as taking a full course load and declaring a major by a certain time. If the student follows all the conditions and still does not graduate on time, the university may either pay for additional courses or make requirement exceptions.
Since the program's incarnation, the number of participants has significantly decreased. In 1997, 52 students participated, 28 in 1998 and 6 in 1999, according to Jocelyn Milner, associate academic planner in the UW-Madison Provost Office.
""It's ironic that not many students are using a four-year degree contract,"" Goldberg said.
More selective schools, such as Harvard College or Yale University, usually have much higher four-year graduation rates of between 80 and 90 percent whereas less selective schools, such as UW System schools, have lower rates of between 30 and 40 percent.
""My impression is that the higher the caliber of the students, the more graduate,"" said Margaret Harrigan, UW-Madison policy and planning analyst.
Another explanation for the higher graduation rates, besides quality of students, involves the cost of education.
""The expensive private institutions have higher four-year graduation rates because you just can't afford five years,"" Harrigan said.
At UW-Madison, the graduation rate for out-of-state students is generally higher than for in-state students.
