Understanding the Increased Time to the Baccalaureate Degree
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Time until completion of a baccalaureate degree has increased markedly over the last three decades. Between 1972 and 1992, average time to degree increased by more than one-quarter of a year, the completion rate among college attendees dropped from 51.1% to 45.3% and, among those receiving degrees, the percent receiving a degree within 4 years dropped from 56.8% to 43.6%. We assess the extent to which these shifts result from changes in the preparation of college students over time, reductions in collegiate resources, erosion in family circumstances, or other broad macro-economic adjustments. We produce evidence that increased stratification in U.S. higher education and reductions in collegiate resources outside the top-tier of institutions are a primary component of the explanation for the observed increases in time to degree. The shift toward initial enrollment at two-year institutions rather than four-year institutions accounts for some of the decline in completion rates. In addition, we find evidence of increased hours of employment among students, which is consistent with students working more to meet rising college costs.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".