By Charlotte West, The Hechinger Report, July 19, 2019.
SILVER SPRING, Md. — Towson University student Christelle Etienne isn’t whiling away these long, lazy days of summer lounging by the pool or hanging out with friends from high school.
Instead, she’s sitting in a classroom at Montgomery College taking classes in anatomy and physiology.
A pre-nursing and foreign language major with a double minor, Etienne is hoping the extra work will keep her on schedule to earn her bachelor’s degree.
That’s something only 42 percent of first-time, full-time college students manage to do, according to the U.S. Department of Education. And the longer students take to finish, the more they wind up paying.
A growing number of students have started to forgo long summer breaks to cut costs and stay on track to graduation. And since many four-year institutions largely shut down between May and late August thanks to an academic calendar that predates the industrial era, many are going to community colleges.
Listening to lectures and slogging through schoolwork in the summer “is no joke,” Etienne said. “But there are so many classes I have to take.”
This phenomenon has grown so much it has a name: “summer swirl.” There’s been a steady increase in summer swirlersanxious to speed up their progress to graduation, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, which tracks this. They are also more likely to graduate from their home institutions than their classmates who don’t take summer classes, the clearinghouse found.
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