Achieving Efficiency at the State University of New York (Page 3)
Instructional Efficiency - Degree Requirements
One of the principal functions in which a university must be efficient is
educating its students. One way academic programs can be inefficient is to require too many hours, hours that are unnecessary for education and that just add to a
student's time on campus. In SUNY, 97 percent of our students are in programs that require a standard credit load of approximately 120-128 credits. The remaining 3
percent are enrolled in intense technical programs that fill specific workforce needs, making them worth the added academic investment to both students and the
State of New York.
Instructional Efficiency - Graduation Rates
SUNY's six-year graduation rate of 58 percent is 13 percentage points above the
national average graduation rate of 45 percent for publicly funded universities and is also above the rate for national private universities. This trend continues
through four- and five-year graduation rates, with SUNY matching or exceeding graduation rates for both public and private universities. These graduation rates do
not include transfer students, or students who attend less than full time. If we include the students who transfer to other SUNY campuses and graduate, the overall
rate jumps from 58 percent to 64 percent over six years. If we consider the number of students who persist beyond six years and probably will graduate, the rate
jumps to 69 percent.
The data shows that there are 260 campuses in the U.S. similar to our comprehensive colleges. SUNY Geneseo ranks first in our country for four-year graduation, and nine other SUNY comprehensive colleges rank in the top 50 (top 20 percent). No other public university system in the nation has so many of its colleges in the top 20 percent, and several states that are recognized for their high-quality comprehensive colleges have no campuses in the top fifty, including California, Texas, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Ohio, to name a few.
For our doctoral campuses, there are 163 similar public research universities. All five of our campuses in this category are in the top 50 (Binghamton University, University at Albany, Environmental Science and Forestry, Stony Brook University, and the University at Buffalo). Binghamton University is ranked third in the nation, behind only the University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary, and ahead of such world renowned campuses as the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The University at Albany ranked 10th nationally, ahead of all of the campuses of the University of California, including UCLA, Berkeley, Davis, and San Diego.
We encourage mission differentiation among our campuses and try to avoid unnecessarily duplicating programs, which leads a significant number of students to transfer between SUNY campuses when they change their major or academic focus. For every two first-time, full-time students, SUNY enrolls one transfer student: 42 percent of our graduates have transferred at least once in their college career, and each year, 8.5 percent of our students are new transfers, 63 percent of them from within the SUNY system. When intra-SUNY transfers are factored into the system-wide graduation rate it jumps to 64 percent over six years. When all transfer students, including those from private colleges, community colleges, and other public systems are included SUNY's six-year graduation rate is 69 percent. Finally, if we include those who transfer out of the SUNY system we see that an impressive 78 percent of our students graduate from college within six years.