Editorial: Universities shouldn’t enforce ‘slacker’ rule

College, as your high school counselor might have told you, is a chance to explore different… College, as your high school counselor might have told you, is a chance to explore different majors before deciding which career best suits you. But at one Big 12 university, indecisiveness might soon become a financial hazard.

In an effort to improve its embarrassing graduation rate — roughly 50 percent of undergraduates finish within four years — the University of Texas recently proposed implementing a so-called “slacker” rule, which would charge out-of-state tuition to in-state students if they don’t earn a degree after a certain number of credit hours. Ideally, this would allow them to “reach commencement sooner, begin their careers or graduate school sooner and incur less debt,” all while saving their parents a good deal of money.

But although some students do, in fact, overstay their welcome, pressuring them to leave after a designated time period seems counterintuitive. Whether or not this policy will stimulate undergraduates’ productivity, it will also severely diminish their flexibility.

For many people, college is an unparalleled opportunity for self-realization. And although changing your mind about, say, a career might seem painless enough, making good on that decision will entail a significant investment of time and money. If, for instance, you discover that engineering, not chemistry, is your favorite subject, you’ll naturally have to switch majors. And if you do so after your first two semesters, you’ll probably have to stay longer than usual to complete all the new requirements.

Rather than discouraging these decisions — which have saved countless former pre-med majors from lifelong misery — administrators should devise alternative means of boosting their graduation numbers. If anything, the university should subject students who consistently fail classes to tuition increases; they, like their peers who switch majors, are likely to stay longer than four years, but less likely to accomplish much in the process.

But we’re not so convinced raising graduation rates should be a university’s top priority in the first place. Thanks largely to US News and other publications, improving higher education has become too much of a numbers game: The quality of a college is now determined solely by its median SAT scores, retention rates and other statistics. If Texas is genuinely committed to bolstering its students’ quality of life, it should concentrate on hiring top faculty and stabilizing tuition rates. These initiatives will translate into long-term benefits for the state much more than any “slacker” rule.

Before similar policies gain traction across the country — Pitt’s four-year graduation rate, 61 percent, might strike some trustees as unacceptably low — university officials should seriously consider their implications. If enacted, students would be forced to choose their careers as early as possible and to endure the consequences for the remainder of their lives. And although everybody knows someone who has remained in school two or three years too long, they wouldn’t sacrifice their freedom to experiment with a variety of subjects simply for the sake of forcing these people out.