Out in 4 years: Budgeting Credit Hours



Simple calculations lead to a credit-hour budget.              Photo by Judi Cox


An extra semester or year of college is an expensive proposition. One of the biggest reasons students fail to graduate in four years is that they take too few credit hours each semester.

What is a credit hour?
In a semester system, a credit hour is usually a measure of time is spent in class each week. A three-credit hour class indicates approximately three hours of class time per week during the course of a semester. Most classes are three-credit hours.

What is an appropriate semester load?
A full-time load for a semester is 12-18 credit hours, which usually translates to four to six classes. Eighteen credit hours are too much for most students. Twelve hours are usually too few. The sweet spot is 15.

Twelve credit hours (again, usually four classes) might be considered full-time and it might leave time for work and extra-curricular activities, but it won't get you to graduation in four years.   

How do I graduate on time?
Complete your credit hours and the course requirements of your program. Use your campus resources to find out what these are.

The math to figure a credit-hour budget is simple. If your program requires 122 credit hours and you take 12 credit hours each of eight semesters, you have only 96 at the end of four years.    

In reality, a 122-credit program requires you to take an average of 15.25 credits each semester (think 15 sometimes, 16 sometimes) to graduate on time with no summer work.

Examples

Prudent Scholar Joan
High school senior Joan reads her college bulletin and talks to her college advisor during orientation. She  needs 124 credits to graduate in her program in 4 years (8 semesters).

124  divided by 8 semesters =  15.5 a semester

Joan's plan: Take 15 hours half the time, 16 hours the other half to reach 124. Talk with your advisor about how best to do this.

Late Start Sally
Sally took light loads her first two years in school so that she could take on more work hours.  She, too wants to graduate in four years (8 semesters). She has four semesters to go and needs 74 more credits.

74 divided by 4 semesters = 18.5 credits a semester

Sally's plan:  18 or 19 hours is a jump, but possible. Sally can't afford to cut her work hours and decides to take summer courses.

Summer courses can be a good way to catch up, but might be a financial trap for students who don't need the extra classes. We'll discuss summer courses (pros/cons, questions to ask yourself) in another blog post.

A Thief Stole My Homework



Beware the break-in.  Photo by Tim Samoff

One of the most valuable things a student can own is a laptop. But, even more valuable to you and your future is what's inside. You can insure a laptop, but can money replace the information that lies within?

When I was an undergraduate, data was fragile.  We used floppy disks. They weren't floppy; they weren't disk-shaped. What they were was unreliable. We'd keep backups of our backups.

Data is less fragile now, but it is vulnerable.  Laptops are still breakable and their best quality, their portability, makes them an easy target for theft.   If that's where you keep your papers, your thesis, your photos, your life, think about how to safeguard it so that if your laptop's lost to theft or natural disaster, at least you still have the data.  Think about the worse case scenario and think beyond that.

Jessica Osuna, a doctoral student lost six years of work when someone smashed in the door of her home to steal her laptop.  The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

"Ms. Osuna was not naive about safeguarding her work. She ran automatic backups of her 15-inch MacBook Pro onto a small external drive. Then every other day or so, she copied her work onto a one-terabyte hard drive that she kept locked in a safe, in case of fire. But whoever burglarized her home busted open the safe and took that drive, too."

A very solid back-up plan might include an external drive, but Ms. Osuna's situation points to the need for an off-site backup plan.

A low-cost option is to post regular copies to CD or USB drive that live off premises. If you're a grad student with an office and multi-year dissertation, you might do that, but for most students, that degree of care is just not practical. It's time to look at other options.

Off-site back up options:

1. Email.  The simplest and cheapest backup is to use email. Every time you complete a draft of an important document email a copy to yourself.

• Pro:  It's available everywhere email is.
• Con: Files can get lost in mountains of email. The longer time has passed, the less easy it is to access your information. 

Takeaway: This is a good method for backing up valuable current projects, but it might not be a long-term storage solution.

2. Campus vaults. Many universities make data storage available to students. This is the best option if you can get it.

• Pros: Convenient for on-campus computing, your campus data storage is probably included in the cost of your tuition and technology fees.
• Cons: May or may not be easily accessible off campus. Beware of upgrades and make sure you copy the goods before you move on. My grad school papers were stored in a vault that was phased out.  Data never really dies, but resurrection can be a major hassle.

Takeaway: Find out what your campus offers and use it to its full potential. Just make sure to take your data with you when you leave.

3. Clouds.

• Pros: Available anywhere you can access to an internet connection. Large amounts of space available. Easy to organize and access.
• Cons: You're looking at $50-$150 a year in fees.

Takeaway:   Costly, but worth it for extremely valuable data years in the making. Probably not necessary for budget-conscious undergraduates who are careful to use other back-up options regularly.

Retaking the SAT: Should you?

When I took the GRE a dozen or so years ago, I freaked out – for lack of a better term – during the last test, which happened to be the now-defunct multiple-choice logic section. I suspect low-blood sugar spiked my anxiety during the last leg of the four-hour test and deep-sixed my efforts. My scores were strangely lopsided.  There seemed little choice but to retake the expensive test.

I did. This time I was prepared. I don't mean I studied more. I mean that I had a healthy, balanced lunch and took an extra sweater for the uncomfortably cold room waiting for me. All of my scores improved slightly, but the results of the second logic test jumped by several hundred points. Yes, I really do mean that I freaked out.

If you are ill during the test or having a bad day and think you can raise your score significantly, then take the test again. But, most people aren't improving that much.

According to the College Board, a little over half of junior test-takes improve during a retake their senior year, 35% of test-takers go down and 10% had no change. That's just a little better than 50/50 odds.

The blog Education Research Report tells us about a study in the journal Psychological Science that  finds students are more likely to retake the SAT if their scores end in 90 (say 1290 instead of 1300, 1390 instead of 1400). The difference is miminal, but it feels significant. This must be the same psychology behind 99-cent pricing. The price $13.99 feels much cheaper than $14.  It's isn't.  The researchers found that students who scored 1390 were just as likely to be accepted as those who scored 1400.

“The SAT doesn’t matter nearly as much for admission as people think, so 10 points probably don’t make a difference,” the author of the study said. 

That's a relief because there is lots of debate about just how good a test the SAT is. In 2008 a commission he National Association for College Admission Counseling suggested that colleges and universities move away from relying on standardized tests for admissions.  In 2009, two professors took the test for the Chronicle of Higher Education.  One was happy with what he found. The other was not impressed. So, if you take the SAT and find some of the questions convoluted or banal, know that at least one journalism professor agrees with you.

A New York Times blog, The Choice, taps also offers some arguments against retaking the SAT or taking both ACT and SAT. Should you take both tests?  Some students, the guest blogger notes, do better at one test than the other and vice versa, but colleges who accept both don't prefer one over the other (if you doubt this advice, you can always ask your particular school). If you take one and do as well as you expected (in line with your practice tests), you might think about the time and money that could be saved if you don't take the other.

Trade-offs: Oxford vs. the Local Regional

Oxford University. Photo by Tejvan Pettinger. 

My counterpart at the blog Frugal Scholar, a university professor who practices frugality, has an interesting thread looking at one young woman's very difficult decision: Go to Oxford and pursue what she loves (at Oxford!) or go the more local, more affordable route, as her parents would like, and graduate debt-free.  And is there an in-between option?

Lots of people have weighed in and it points to the various opinions and tactics -- even among the frugal. Look, learn or even join the discussion at http://frugalscholar.blogspot.com/2011/03/college-debt-once-more-worth-it.html.

DePaul Drops SAT requirement



DePaul University.  Photo: Richie Diesterheft

 College costs start as early as your sophomore year of high school if you take the PSAT and your high school doesn't pick up the tab.  SAT and ACT testing fees can add up to hundreds of dollars very quickly.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this week that DePaul University will drop standardized tests as a requirement in a new "student-centered strategy."  It is now the largest private college to go test optional. Students who choose not to send scores will submit answers to essay questions instead.

"DePaul's announcement is a reminder that the test-optional label now applies to a diverse mix of colleges," writes Chronicle reporter Eric Hoover.  Test-optional policies are "not only for nonselective institutions or small liberal-arts colleges."

The SAT costs $47 this year, with extra for subject-area tests and special services. The lower-priced ACT costs start at $33. If you need the ACT Plus Writing the cost is $48.00. Each has a  menu of costs depending on if you want your scores sent to more than four schools, if you need to change your test date or center, etc.

It's common for students to retake the SAT or ACT, or to take them both. You could save an easy hundred if more schools drop the requirement. We'll explore the reasons -- good and bad -- for retaking in an upcoming post. 

In the meantime, I leave you with the words of Jon Boeckenstedt, associate vice president for enrollment management at DePaul. "Test scores are valuable for some things," he says, "but the focus and obsession we have about them as a country is a little bit misplaced, if not a lot misplaced."