Planning Ahead

Students must be responsible and use the new policies to graduate on time.

Upon graduating high school, incoming freshmen leave behind four years of schooling to embark on what they hope will be no more than four years for their bachelor’s degrees.

However, sprinting to the undergraduate finish line in four years is a luxury not always afforded. According to the American Enterprise Institute, 53 percent of students at four-year institutions are graduating within six years.

Every additional year beyond four years is just more unnecessary and unwanted debt. Students should rely on themselves, in addition to the following new policies, in order to graduate on time.

While the matriculation situation at Temple may not be as severe as Harvard University’s 97 percent six-year matriculation, Temple students’ 67 percent matriculation rate in six years is hardly desirable. That’s about two-thirds of the approximate 26,600 undergraduate-student population depending on a hefty amount of loans, grants and other forms of financial aid to obtain their bachelor’s.

As Alexis Sachdev reports in “Policy changes to be enacted,” Page 1, university officials have amended and created five academic policies to help students graduate on time.

While these academic policies are intended to help students, The Temple News encourages students to help themselves.

The changes and additions to these policies are steps in the right direction to help students succeed in a timely manner without accumulating a ridiculous amount of debt.

Changes have been made to the following academic policies: Students can only retake a course once; withdrawing from a course counts as taking it once; conditional standing is removed and students who fail to improve their GPAs will be formally dismissed and forced to wait four years before re-applying to the university; the 12 percent of students who failed to graduate are permitted to re-apply to Temple after four years, when their credits and GPAs will be handled as if they were transfer students.

The fifth and new academic policy grants undergraduate students the ability to take a leave of absence without being penalized.

Undergraduate years are meant to permit students to learn about themselves, but this exploration should extend beyond social life. Students should meet with advisers and professors regularly, moderate work and play and independently track their academic progress.