Key points:
- Students should be able to clearly see how requirements align with their goals
- This is the last “old” college admissions cycle
- Higher ed faces mounting challenges amid evolving expectations
- For more news on college completion, visit eCN’s Campus Leadership hub
Late last year, members of Congress met to scrutinize college costs and to press institutions to be more transparent about what students pay and what they get in return. But while the hearing focused on dollars and cents, the price of college takes many forms.
I learned this lesson as a first-generation student from Pakistan attending college in the United States. I knew what I wanted to study and hoped to reach my goals efficiently, but I encountered a system that wasn’t always easy to navigate on my own. Without family experience or cultural context to guide me, I often found myself wondering: How could the path from education to career be made more transparent?
Many students still face similar challenges today. The lack of clear, navigable pathways through college and into careers creates confusion, extends time-to-degree, and makes it harder for students to see the full value of a degree. Just over half of students report receiving clear guidance on which courses they need or how to sequence them to stay on track. On top of that, roughly 40 percent of students who start college never finish.
Much of the conversation around the issue rightly focuses on upfront costs. Tuition, fees, and student debt remain critical barriers, and financial stress remains the number one reason students drop out. But there is another, less visible toll that often goes overlooked. The hidden cost of college isn’t just money. It’s time and opportunity.
Too many students have little idea which courses count toward graduation, how long it will take to finish, or how their academic decisions connect to careers that pay a living wage. Research on the economics behind college dropout decisions has found that students frequently reassess the value of continuing once they encounter unexpected delays, unclear requirements, or longer-than-anticipated paths to completion. In other words, the value of college is a rolling cost-benefit calculation.
As timelines stretch and both financial and opportunity costs rise (and the perceived value of college falls below the perceived cost of continuing), students drop out. Unsatisfied with how long it’s taking to earn a credential and start their career, more than 30 percent of students who drop out say they leave college to pursue work. Giving students a clear understanding of their path at every step changes that calculation. One recent survey found that 60 percent of students who left college without earning a degree said they would return if they were given a clearer path to graduation.
First-generation students are especially vulnerable. They are significantly less likely than their peers to complete a bachelor’s degree in four years, regardless of their level of income. This is a structural problem. Colleges have long relied on students to figure things out for themselves or for overloaded advising systems to guide them. More than two-thirds of advisors have caseloads of more than 150 students and at community colleges that number can reach 1,200 students per advisor. Such an approach was never sustainable.
When institutions don’t intentionally map and communicate program requirements and leave critical information scattered across systems, students can’t clearly see how requirements align with their goals or how courses stack toward completion. They stumble, slow down, lose momentum, or leave altogether. Institutions should instead map requirements in ways that allow students to see their progress, understand what counts, and explore multiple on-ramps to careers. At many institutions, implementing these kinds of reforms at scale has been difficult, requiring resources and coordination that haven’t always been available.
That’s beginning to change. Advances in technology are now making it possible for colleges to offer greater clarity at scale. Institutions are adopting modern degree planning and advising tools that bring requirements, progress tracking, and advising into a single, student-centered experience. The University of Virginia, for example, now allows students and their advisors to visualize their full academic journey and easily track progress toward a degree–all in one online platform.
Higher education should not come with hidden costs. The time students invest and the opportunities they forfeit while waiting to graduate should be minimized by design, not left to chance. When students can clearly see their trajectory from their first class to the first day of their career, they finish more quickly and with greater purpose. They save money, enter the workforce sooner, and bring greater confidence and stronger skills to employers.
By building easily navigable pathways from day one, colleges can finally deliver on the promise of college not just as a credential, but as a clear roadmap to meaningful careers and economic mobility.
Sabih Bin Wasi is CEO and Co-Founder of Stellic.