Brennan LaBrie
Editor-In-Chief
When I returned to campus this fall, I was pleased to see a lot of familiar faces from the class of 2021 walking around.
Like me, they were technically supposed to be out in the real world by now, but have instead decided to take advantage of the PLUS year offered by Pacific Lutheran University (PLU). Last August, PLU announced that any student fully enrolled in the 2020-21 school year would get a fifth year of college tuition-free, and it’s no surprise that dozens of my friends jumped on this opportunity. Some took on another major or a minor, some stuck around for personal enrichment, and others seized the opportunity to have one more season as a Division Three athlete. Personally, I upgraded my Communication minor to a major and took on several leadership positions in student media.
As I saw more and more of my fellow Super Seniors, I began wondering just how many of us there are wandering around campus. It felt as if PLU had five full classes of students at one time, something I had never seen before — there were always a few students who took an extra semester or two to finish their curriculum, but they were few in number. Is our fifth year situation unique compared to other private universities, I wondered? And are we a burden on the university’s expenses, or clogging up class rosters?
I took my questions to Mike Frechette, the Dean of Enrollment Management at PLU, who informed me that there are 135 of us Super Seniors. Most are still working towards a degree, including ones added this year. Others have completed their degree requirements and are taking additional courses for self enrichment.
Breaking the Trend
While Frechette doesn’t know the number of Super Seniors at other regional colleges, he suspects that PLU may harbor the most.
“I would have to imagine that in Washington, at least, we’re pretty unique right now in the number of fifth year seniors that we have on campus,” he said.
This is largely because PLU is one of a “very, very small number of institutions” that have offered their students an additional semester or two with no tuition costs. These colleges include Beloit College and Norbert College, both in Wisconsin, and Transylvania College in Kentucky. Other colleges, including Princeton and Georgetown, offered students a 10-15% discount on tuition for the 2020-21 school year in order to retain students not thrilled by the online format of most classes.
The spike in fifth year students at PLU this year is especially pronounced compared to past years, Frechette added. Before the pandemic, PLU was witnessing a steady decline in such students, something that Frechette attributes to an increase in students arriving at PLU with advanced standing. He particularly points to the popularity of Washington’s Running Start program, in which high school students can take college credits, and even obtain an Associates of Arts degree, for free at their local community college. The program, which was launched in Washington State in 1993, has grown steadily every year since, with a 56% increase in running start enrollment between the 2006-7 and 2016-17 school year, according to the Seattle Times.
“We have a lot of students who come in with Running Start credit, with AP (Advanced Placement) credit, and for many students it no longer takes them even four years to finish their degree; some students can finish in three years or three and a half years,” Frechette said. He believes that this phenomenon is affecting all Washington universities.
A primary factor behind Running Start’s popularity is student’s ability to avoid the costs of a year or two at university, costs which consistently rise each school year. And when they get to college, they often don’t take any more classes than necessary to finish their degree. Taking a fifth, or sixth, year of college, a popular choice in my parent’s generation, is no longer a feasible move for many students.
“A couple of decades ago when tuition was a lot lower than it is now, I think a fifth year was a lot more doable,” Frechette said.
A burden on PLU?
This influx of super seniors is not putting any strain on the university, Frechette assured me. It turns out, the 135 Super Seniors are counterbalanced by an especially small first-year class. PLU welcomed 510 students into the class of 2021 this fall, which is roughly 100 students less than the average first-year classes in previous years. Frechette partially blames this decrease on the pandemic and the recruitment limitations that it created.
“The campus visit is one of the top three reasons students tell us that they come to PLU. They come here, they fall in love with the culture, the atmosphere and the vibe of the campus, and without us being able to sell the campus in person last year, it definitely had an impact on the number of students that attended,” he said.
PLU has actually seen a steady decline in first years over the last decade due to a falling national birth rate, Frechette added. This, coupled with an ever-shrinking number of fifth-year students, has played a large role in the financial difficulties that PLU and other private schools nationwide are facing.
The only real caveat of the PLUS Year for PLU is that it’s graduation rate, a statistic coveted by all U.S. colleges, will certainly dip from its current position at 69%. However, PLU has a plan for when they submit their 2020-21 graduation rate to the external bodies who collect this data.
“We’re gonna have a blurb ready to go, so these external agencies understand that our four year graduation rate dropped precisely because we’ve invited students to extend their time here at no cost of tuition,” Frechette said.
Benefiting Both Sides
From my conversation with Frechette, it seems as though the PLUS year offer has had a minimal negative impact on the university while greatly benefiting students such as myself.
“I think students have appreciated the opportunity to be back and have another go at their Senior year because Senior year was basically sabotaged by Covid,” Frechette said.
As someone having another go at my Senior year, I couldn’t agree more. So far this term, the joy of seeing old friends again, and meeting new ones who I would never have known if I had graduated, has made the PLUS year worth it.
However, I wanted to know if my Super Senior peers felt the same way, so I reached out to a few of them.
For Max Larson, a fifth-year kinesiology major and defensive end on the PLU football team, his decision to stay has been “so worth it,” he said.
“I didn’t feel it was right to end college without a strong Senior year, and the ability to make in person memories,” he said, adding that PLU’s “fun, high energy community” is what brought him here in the first place.
“Football did play a huge role in me coming back and the opportunity to compete at the college level one last time,” he said. “However, academics and the social portion also played heavily into my decision. It took a lot of stress off of last spring. I got to extend some classes to this year instead of jam-packing my schedule last year.”
Like Larson, swimmer Jared Toschi decided to stick around for a fifth season of sports, but said that adding a degree in Communication to his Political Science degree was the “determining factor” in him staying. Toschi saw an opportunity to pad his resume and hone his communication skills that he sees as “essential” to his desired career in lobbying. On the swim team, he’s focusing on building leadership skills over setting any personal records this season.
“It’s going well so far,” he said of the PLUS year. “I’m glad that I did it.”
Dana Baughman also added a Communication degree this year. She was interested in double majoring in Communication and Education before, as she sees it as “really useful for a lot of fields,” but was not able to due to the sheer amount of credits required for the Education major. She is excited about the doors that this new major may open for her.
“I have been thinking about looking into some other career opportunities aside from teaching, and I just think that comm can open up a lot of possibilities for different types of fields that I can go into,” Baughman said.
Braden McNeil, a Biology major, is grateful for the PLUS year for allowing him to “catch up” on lost progress during the pandemic, as the virtual format was challenging for him to succeed in versus an in-person one. His advice for younger students is to take advantage of the PLUS year when their time comes, as it offers “a great tool” for post-college success.
Like Braden, I would recommend the PLUS year to any PLU student who attended school last year. After all, at the end of the day, a year of college with no tuition is a pretty sweet deal.
