Overcoming Hurdles to Graduation : CSUN Should Tailor Courses and Counseling to Meet the Needs of Working Students
The good news is that the graduation rate at Cal State Northridge has begun to improve. The bad news is that the improvement has merely brought CSUN up from 270th place out of 298 major institutions in the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. to 265th place. And even that modest progress carries a caveat. CSUN’s position, among the seven Division I schools in the California state system, has actually worsened. It is now dead last among them.
That is why there is little solace in the fact that 31% of the people in the most recent freshman class assessed at CSUN had managed to graduate after six years. It’s more of a statement of how bad things have been at the Northridge campus.
Yes, we know that many CSUN students hold down part-time or full-time jobs. More specifically, most of the university’s students work at least 20 hours a week, with about 20% of those students logging 40 hours a week on the job. But that cannot be viewed as an excuse. It can only be looked upon as something that will make a higher student success rate more difficult to achieve, and other commuter schools around the nation have attained success.
CSUN administrators say that they want to survey graduating students to determine why they have taken so long to earn degrees. We would argue that this is wasted effort, too late in the game. The students who ought to be surveyed are those struggling to get to the point of graduation, particularly those who are in their earliest post-secondary years.
In truth, however, there are many clues already. It does not take a survey to note, for example, that CSUN students complain most often about the same shortcomings cited by an accreditation team in 1991. The problems have not been addressed.
Students, for example, still complain of shortages in the general education classes they need to graduate. They cite inconsistent academic counseling: being told that one set of classes is needed; later learning that the earlier advice was wrong.
Yes, anticipated budget cuts will reduce the number of classes offered, but it then becomes even more important for CSUN to try to devote a higher percentage of the remaining classes to general education.
The other point to be made here is that working students have different needs. They cannot be on campus during regular hours, which means that academic counseling must have flexible hours to meet their needs. Part of their assessment ought to include individualized plans on how they can manage to earn a degree while working part time or full time. And they require more assistance in terms of time management and encouragement than full-timers. Universities must conform to the needs of their particular students. They cannot expect working students who have severely limited options to conform to the offerings of a school that might still be operating as though its students attend classes full time and graduate in four years.
