When Dr. Dennis A. Kramer II, assistant professor of higher education at the University of Florida, set out to study the impact of excess credit-hour policies that charge students extra for taking significantly more courses than they need to graduate, he expected to find that the policies would be associated with higher graduation rates.
Kramer said he was surprised to find that not only were the policies having a “very limited” impact on graduation rates and degree completion, but they were actually plunging students — particularly low- and middle-income students — deeper into debt.
Kramer’s findings are contained in a new study being released today titled “The Costs and Consequences of Excess Credit Hour Policies.”
The study — conducted by Kramer, Michael R. Holcomb, a research associate at the University of Florida’s Institute of Higher Education, and Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor of education at Seton Hall University — appears in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a journal of the American Educational Research Association, or AERA.
The study comes at a time when policymakers and higher education stakeholders are engaged in an ongoing discussion about what strategies can be implemented to increase graduation rates and reduce costs for both students and institutions. Taking excess credits is seen as a waste of both public and individual dollars.
Excess credit-hour policies — designed to spur students to graduate in a more timely fashion — are mechanisms through which students are assessed surcharges if the credits they have taken significantly exceed the number of credits needed to graduate. The threshold is usually 115 to 130 percent above the credits needed to graduate, and the surcharges can require students to pay as much as twice the amount they would ordinarily pay per credit, Kramer’s paper explains.
