A few years back I wrote piece about spending a post graduate year in boarding school before moving on to college-  “A Post Graduate Year; what’s that?” The reasons for pursuing a PG year proved consistent among the students and families choosing an extra year of high school- graduating young, improving maturity, more academic preparation, seeking admission to a more competitive college, improving athletic opportunities- all under the umbrella that a large number of high school graduates simply aren’t ready to go straight into a four year college.

The thoughts, topics and statistics of my earlier article surfaced yesterday in a Boston Globe article by Neil Swidey, “The Four-Year College Myth.”

The driving force behind Swidey’s argument lives in his statement, “When I first entered this world (higher ed), I assumed these students with bumpy post-high school paths were the outliers. The real shame is how mainstream they are.”

Swidey’s data and arguments are eye popping and prompt head shakes of amazement. Our ingrained assumptions about completing high school, followed by completing a bachelor’s degree in 4 years, bare little-to-no connection with reality. The paths of most students through education prove flexible and cost driven, but policy makers and many higher ed thinkers seem wedded and unwilling to let go of the old 4 year BA model:

    ”Why are our perceptions so out of step with reality? Probably because the old path still dominates at name-brand private colleges, and they continue to be the prism through which so much of higher education is viewed.

 ’American elites, whether in education, politics, business, or the media, tend to focus on a small number of elite institutions and ignore the large number of institutions where the vast majority of college students are enrolled,’ says Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, a higher-ed advocacy and research group based in Washington, D.C. ‘We tend to underappreciate the complexity and diversity of higher education.’

True, the four-year graduation rate — regardless of student age — is higher at private colleges (54 percent) than public colleges (32 percent). And the rate climbs a good deal higher at elite private schools. But to get an idea of scale, consider this: If you add up the undergraduate students at all of the Ivy League colleges, you get about 60,000. Then compare that with the roughly 40,000 undergraduate students just at Ohio State University’s main campus. Or the 6.6 million students in community colleges across the country…

“Today’s truly “traditional” path is a goulash of enrollment patterns — frequent starts and stops, serial transfers, and oscillation between full- and part-time student status. People who study enrollment even have a term to describe these circuitous routes that students are increasingly taking, such as hopping from a two-year college to a four-year college and then back to a two-year college, with a couple of timeouts in between. They call it “swirling.”

Fluidity is the defining characteristic of today’s college student. Things promise to get only more fluid as the recession forces more people to consider lower-cost alternatives like community colleges and part-time status. But our rigid higher-ed system fights with this fluidity, making it hard for many students to adapt to college life and making the transfer process more complicated than it needs to be. The cost is lost credits, time, money, and opportunity. The fact that transfer students are typically not counted in federal graduation-rate data only strengthens the argument that public policy is operating from a distorted sense of reality.” (Boston Globe)

So what does this mean for our private school community driven and shaped by the assumptions that our graduates will leave us one June and 4 years later leave the halls of a four year undergraduate institution, diploma in hand, heading into the workforce or on to graduate studies? Personal experience shows me that far more boarding and private school students are part of majority than we like to acknowledge. These persistent assumptions and beliefs cause us to propose and encourage plans based on what we assume and what others want rather than what is best and provides the most options for students.

The world demands and requires that we in the private school world consider our rigidity and that we, too, become flexible. The fact is, beyond the most elite private and boarding schools, our graduates, too, often take more than four years to graduate, change majors, transfer, encounter financial obstacles, and, from personal experience, just don’t know what they want to study or make of themselves.

We often know that something other than direct matriculation into a four year college or university might be a good option for a student. But, it’s difficult to challenge the assumptions and expectation of parents. To some extent, after all, what are they paying for.

But, might honest assessment and placement be better for students and families in the long run?

Raising the question, should private schools do more to educate parents on thinking and options beyond direct matriculation into a private, four year BA granting college?  Yes.

The beauty is there are some great options available- community college, paid intern or apprentice programs, state universities that cost much less than their private counterparts. All of these can slow down the college process, save families some money, provide broad experiences to students and give students the time and knowledge to mature and get a handle what they like, what they do well and what they want to make of themselves.

That’s education.

Photo credit: bridges&balloons