Graduating seniors get a green light

By Matt Sun
Online Forty-Niner
Contributing Writer

According to statistics released this month, students at Cal State Long Beach are on average taking more than five years to graduate. This has raised ongoing concerns of retention and graduation rates and efforts have been made within the past two years to relieve problems of retention among seniors.

Inspired by a similar program presented during a National Academic Advising Association meeting, Graduation Green Light is a project that helps seniors graduate and is expected to play a dominant role in reducing retention rates and increasing graduation rates at CSULB.

Introduced to CSULB by Susan Black, the assistant director of the Academic Advising Center in 2003, Graduation Green Light's goal is to assist graduating students complete remaining degree requirements in order to graduate on schedule. From the executive summary of Graduation Green Light, academic advisors and peer advisors work directly with Green Light to find solutions to problems faced by students. With Marilee Samuelson as its coordinator, Green Light has come a long way in helping as many as 239 students. That is more than half of the 465 students who filed for graduation.

"Many students do not grasp the 14 requirements needed to graduate and only focus on the major and GE courses," Black said. "Of the 14, the one that becomes an obstacle for many seniors is the Writing Proficiency Examination."

In the last few decades, students have taken longer than five years to graduate. The CSU system has been looking at and analyzing graduation rates on a six-year period.

"The university has been very interested in improving retention and graduation rates," said Mike Hostetler, associate vice president for Student Services and Dean of Students. "We do not have a big retention problem, which is good. However, we can do better."

Vincent A. Novack, CSULB's chief statistician is involved in the graduation process. "Retention rates are the sum of two components: graduation rates and persistence, which is the number of students still enrolled, Novack Said. "The 4-year graduation rates for CSUs are not particularly useful since most of our students take more than five years to graduate. For the 1998 cohort, which is the most recent class for which this can be calculated, CSULB's retention rate is 67.2 percent."

Because CSULB is a commuter school of approximately 34,000 people, students can become lost in the crowds. The main causes of retention are caused by four factors: lack of connection with school faculty, insufficient academic advising, time management problems and financial aid, Hostetler said.

"It is easy for students who are new to Long Beach to find themselves lost in a commuter school like ours," Hostetler said. "That is why academic advising and an active faculty are necessary. Financial aid also plays a big role in retention rate."

Hostetler will hold a meeting with Financial Aid later this month to analyze further how financial aid can impact retention rates at CSULB.

Suzanne Wurzer, a contact working closely with Green Light and associate director of the Academic Advising Center, said that students can be faced with major setbacks if they do not fully understand all of the graduation requirements. The Green Light Project helps students by stepping in and contacting seniors who have been denied graduation or are finding trouble on their way to graduation.

"I have known students who have been offered jobs by big-time corporations such as Boeing International and the employers requested and saw the official transcript may deny the job to the student on the basis that they lied on their application when they wrote down that they graduated," Wurzer said. "It is up to [Graduation Green Light] to eliminate situations such as these."

In a short span of almost two years, Green Light's achievements have not gone unnoticed.

"I believe that Green Light is probably the best program so far that will help the university," Hostetler said. "The people in Academic Advising have gone out of their way to save seniors who are having difficulty in graduating. Cal State Long Beach wants to have the best graduation rates compared to other commuting universities and I think we're going to get there."