I took 8 myself. But then I also worked, and I owe nothing, so.
How about not judging us? It was a conscious choice to work to pay off school.
I agree about keeping them in longer. I had to get special permission when I had enough saved up to take 12 courses in a row in history.
As for community college, if I did it all over again, I’d have gone there in the first place. I had full freight and ended up turning it down to go to the big university. There are plenty of reasons why a student would choose a community college, not the least of which is that it substantially reduces the cost of their degree.
High school kids who are not prepared for college level math classes, or much else, then drop out is a problem.
The social promotion by high school teachers and administrators is a bad idea. Kids should repeat classes in any subject if they do not understand that subject the first time through.
Taking eight years or even longer, while working or doing other service, is not the problem. Much good can be accomplished (if a student is just marking time with no focus in school) by working in the real world for a while.
Some of the most motivated students were / are returning GI’s who have a more mature focus on life.
“I took 8 myself. But then I also worked, and I owe nothing, so.”
6.5 years after high-school myself for my BS. Another 6 for my MS. Of course I was working full time as an engineer during the last 2 years of my BSCoE (Computer Engineering). I had a great opportunity to work for a local company that I couldn’t pass up. I guess I was doing something right.
I was done with the coursework for my MSEE in 3 years (again, working full time), but I caught a bad case of “Everything but Thesis” syndrome. The silver lining there was that when my work was done, I was actually able to demonstrate it working the way I wanted it to work due to larger FPGAs being available at far lower costs than when I started (that’s my excuse anyway) :-)! I wanted to work with floating point structures in hardware as opposed to fixed point as I had little “real life” experience with that stuff.
I also started out at a Community College. I switched my major three times as I kind-of knew what I wanted to do, but had no idea what I wanted to do coming out of high school. I had excellent math teachers, an outstanding Spanish teacher, and two excellent English teachers (though my writing skills could use some improvement :-) ). I was kind of stuck as I didn’t know if I wanted learn more foreign languages, go the computer science route, switch to electrical engineering, etc. Turned out CoE was a perfect blend of stuff I *wanted* to learn.
I also have a friend who shares a similar story. He runs a great business down in Florida doing translation services for a list of companies too long to mention. It’s amazing what knowing languages of the Middle East can do for you these days.
So, this whole assumption of “inept” when one mentions that they took longer than 4 years to finish a degree is nonsense at best. Don’t judge a book by its cover. My University is a state school, but, for what its worth, I have had no complaints about my work and, quite frankly, I love what I do for a living.
Now, having spewed all of the above, I know at least 4 people that have screwed the system big-time with Community Colleges. What they would do is max out a student loan seeing that getting accepted is not a problem and everyone is entitled to loans. They would stop going to class after a week or two. In two of those cases, they were able to repeat this “trick” FIVE times. Yes, FIVE.
The maximum loan back then was $8500 a year. That’s one hell of a nice side income in your late teens/early 20s for doing no work. I’ll bet some real money that this was never paid back.
I’ve also heard that tuition at the Community College I attended has tripled since the early 1990s. I guess a lot of people caught on to this scheme.
They should have a “fail twice and you’re out” rule for student loans. I actually think they do, but it is never enforced. If you fail two consecutive semesters, you are ineligible for student loans until you pay back what you owe. That’ll filter out a TON of garbage that abuses the existing system. I am not saying the existing system is a good one ... I’m just pointing out one thing that can be done to stop that nonsense.