OPINION
PLEASE JUST LET ME GET OUT OF HERE TUFTS’ UNREASONABLY RESTICTIVE GRADUATION REQUIREMENTS A
meeting I had with some development officials in the Tufts fundraising office a few weeks ago began with my least favorite question: “So, what year are you at Tufts?” Like many students between the class years of 2021 and 2024, I took a year-long leave of absence during the height of the COVID pandemic to avoid paying exorbitant tuition fees for Zoom school and accepted a job organizing with the Democratic Party of New Hampshire. This was a life turn that my freshman-year professor of political science recommended to me. This professor also kindly served as a professional reference for me in the application stage. I have a lot to be grateful for with regard to the faculty at this university for giving me such helpful guidance and career support during an incredibly tumultuous time. Feeling thankful for my professors is pretty much where my gratitude toward this university ends. According to my student ID, my email signature, the name tag I was assigned at a Tufts fundraising gala a few weeks ago, and the emails I routinely receive from the registrar asking me to register for a graduation I cannot attend, I am supposed to be graduating this spring. According to the credits I’ve amassed on SIS from, for lack of a better term, busting ass for six semesters, I should be graduating next fall. However, according to a series of cold and robotic emails I’ve exchanged with the deans of this school, my graduation timeline is contingent on the receipt of 8 full-time semester tuition payments (or some creative, but additionally expensive, solution such as studying abroad or over the summer). While understanding that residency is meant to describe fulltime enrollment rather than proximal residence, it is pretty ironic for an institution that only guarantees 26 TUFTS OBSERVER MAY 1, 2023
housing for four semesters to have an eight-semester requirement known as the “residency” requirement. But I digress. Many institutions have similar requirements, also called “residency” requirements, but they tend to differ in one key way—these requirements refer to how many credits a student has completed across any number of semesters, rather than how many semesters they have spent as a fulltime enrolled student. According to most universities, these provisions ensure that a majority of a graduating student’s credits were earned at the university that is noted on their degree, as opposed to transfer credits or prematriculation credits. Basically, in order to legitimately obtain a degree from a particular school, you should be prepared to take most of your courses at that school. This seems generally reasonable to me. What strikes me as highly unreasonable is the requirement that students must not only complete 120 semester-hour units at Tufts and the various distribution and major requirements, but that students must complete those SHUs over the course of eight full-time semesters. It seems especially unreasonable that even if students can complete those requirements in a shorter amount of time, as I (and many other Tufts students) have, they still must pay for eight semesters. A full-time semester at Tufts has a SHU cap of 18 credits, which can be raised slightly higher upon petition. This means Tufts students should plan to take an average of 15 credits per semester. However, a student can easily complete 120 in seven semesters, or even in fewer semesters with the assistance of pre-matriculation credits, credit over-enrollment, or summer community college classes. All of these options are generally cheaper
By Leah Cohen
than completing a full-time eighth semester at this university, one of the most expensive in the nation, with one of the most competitive adjacent housing markets which features yearly skyrocketing prices. Some students are eligible for a waiver from this burdensome hurdle to graduation. Students who were enrolled full-time in Fall 2020 can be exempted from the residency requirement and complete their degree in six full-time semesters. I cannot state with certainty what the reasoning from the office of Academic Advising was, and, to my understanding, Tufts has given a statement to The Daily that can best be described as incoherent and vague. Essentially, Dean Lowe noted that attending college during COVID was an unusual challenge, and this waiver was introduced to somehow ameliorate that experience. Personally, my (perhaps cynical) take on this waiver is that Tufts’ policymakers understand that students who paid full tuition for a semester of Zoom classes with virtually zero extracurricular activities perhaps overpaid for an underwhelming collegiate experience. As such, the waiver is a refund of sorts—if you overpaid for bad education, you can get out of paying for one or two semesters. But what about students who opted out of Zoom school and decided to take a leave of absence during the pandemic to avoid shelling out tens of thousands of dollars to be locked away in Harleston Hall for four months? Were their undergraduate experiences not also affected by the pandemic? Did they not also suffer pitfalls in their education due to COVID? Did they not also return to a reduced-capacity university that often failed to meet the standard of education Tufts promised to them in admissions packets, during tours, and in their promotional materials?