Tick, tock, students

Public schools across the country, and especially in the Rio Grande Valley, are constantly looking for ways to get more students to stay enrolled through graduation. Those who graduate and go on to college, create the opposite problem: The schools have trouble getting some of them to leave.

The University of Texas at Austin is looking to do something about it. While the problem is even worse at Valley UT campuses, any such efforts probably aren’t possible.

A committee on Tuesday recommended that the university impose a requirement that students get their bachelor’s degrees within 10 semesters. Summer classes would not count among the 10, offering students a chance to use the shorter sessions to stay on track.

Most degree plans are designed to be completed in four years, if students take the standard course load of 15 hours a semester. UT students take on average 8.5 semesters.

The Second Task Force on Enrollment Strategy report states that students who remain enrolled too long “reduce the university’s capacity to serve other students who wish to attend UT, both freshmen and transfers.”

Simply put, at a university that has reached its enrollment limit, every person who stays in class too long fills seats that can’t be offered to new students.

The task force also wants to limit the number of times a student can change majors.

The group’s concerns are understandable, but they seem to ignore the modern reality of higher education, especially in South Texas where so many students lack the resources to go to school full time.

Even graduating in

10 semesters is just a pipe dream for most Valley students. For many students the only way to work toward a university degree is to work full time and take part-time classes. That fact is reflected in the schools’ demographics.

On average, students at the University of Texas-Pan American are 24 years old. Just 13 percent get their degrees within four years; after six years the completion rate is just

34 percent. At the University of Texas-Brownsville and Texas Southmost College, the numbers are even starker — the average student age is 29; fewer than

4 percent earn their degrees in four years, and just 16 percent have graduated within six years. Needless to say, most Valley students would fall victim to any policy that penalizes those who can’t take full class loads every semester.

Some of those students are excellent in the classroom; they just aren’t able to attend school full time. They already endure penalties that include tuition rates that increase as their matriculation lengthens. Any further punishment could push many of those students out the door, and deprive them of the chance to pull themselves and their families out of the poverty that plagues so many Valley families.

We hope the task force has considered other options, some of which might be more practical. For example, the late Teel Bivins, who was chairman of the state Senate Education Committee, sought to address the issue by removing remedial classes from upper-level universities. Students who couldn’t pass college-level courses, he maintained, should transfer to community colleges until they could catch up. This would reduce the cost and space the four-year schools had to invest in students who weren’t academically able to graduate in four years.

It would be nice if every deserving student was able to get a college education. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. However, policies to reduce enrollment should favor deserving students based on performance, not on tenure.