Living the Institutions: UBC falsely advertises a four-year bachelor’s degree

Living the Institutions is a column about the institutions and norms that impact the experience of undergraduate students at UBC.

Marie Erikson is a fourth-year student in the philosophy honours program and author of the column Living the Institutions. In her work, she aims to mix theory, experience, policy and norms through clear and nuanced writing. She enjoys an engaging conversation about cats, coffee or whatever event or philosophical conception is deeply bothering her at the moment.

First degrees at the undergraduate level are commonly considered to take four years. A bachelor of education, Juris Doctor (an undergraduate degree at UBC) or other second degree undergraduate programs may have shorter lengths, but the undergraduate population largely consists of students who will complete their degree in four years, right?

Except they largely don’t. Significantly more students take longer than four years to graduate than students who take four or fewer. And this is no new phenomenon. The Ubyssey previously reported that in every year from 2011 to 2018, more Vancouver undergraduates took five or more years to graduate than four or less, which held true when filtering for any of the four largest faculties or domestic versus international students. Averaging across the years studied, nearly three times as many students graduated in five plus years compared to those who graduated in four or less.

The trend continues. According to UBC’s most recent data, 25.8 per cent of Vancouver students who started in 2019 graduated within four years. Some of the students not included in this figure will transfer out or leave university altogether, but the same 2019 cohort had a retention rate of 86.3 per cent in their fourth year.

None of this is to say that completing a first bachelor’s in four years is impossible or even unfeasible. Thirty students in that 2019 cohort graduated within three years, but no one would reasonably take 0.4 per cent of a population as a representative sample, and a significant minority does continue to graduate within four years. Why then does UBC describe these degrees as taking four years when three-quarters of students take longer?

UBC would likely claim a first-time bachelor’s can be completed in those four years by taking the program’s assumed course load. So let us assume the lowest credit requirement of 120 credits over 4 years or 30 credits for one winter session, as is the case for the standard bachelor’s in the faculties of Arts, Pharmaceutical Sciences and Science, as well as the bachelor of kinesiology under the Faculty of Education.

If one credit typically signifies one class hour, we can expect a student to be in class for 15 hours a week, assuming they are earning 30 credits across the Winter Session and . UBC does not publish expectations of workload for every credit, but a course credit at McGill University requires about 45 hours of in and out-of-class work. Since this similar Canadian university also requires 120 credits for a BA and a BSc, has almost equal term lengths and has a standard load of 15 credits per term, it is reasonable to expect McGill’s workload per credit expectations to at least roughly match UBC’s. Using McGill’s workload estimate, 5 3-credit courses would thus mean 675 hours of work across the term, or 52 hours a week for UBC’s 13 weeks of class (counting the 2 days after reading break and the 3 days after Imagine Day as one week).

52 hours a week significantly exceeds the culturally predominant expectation of the 40-hour work week, and students also often have work and clubs taking their time. Forty-three per-cent of students who responded to the 2024 AMS Academic Experience Survey reported using part-time employment to financially support their studies, and even more students could be working part-time just to save money or gain work experience for life post-graduation.

It is important to note that UBC encourages students to work and get involved in these ways. Not only does UBC suggest working as a way for students to fund their education, it hires students through the Work Learn program, undergraduate research and other on-campus jobs.

Even for students that work no more than 10 hours a week, the maximum for the Work Learn program, that 10 hours is another large demand of a student’s time on top of their already overflowing academic workload. Students in jobs without such restrictions could also work more than 10 hours. Regardless, expecting over 50 hours of schoolwork is already questionable without another 10 hours of work bringing the total expected work hours to over 60.

Employed or not, students are rightly encouraged by UBC to get more involved via campus activities. Having a break from coursework can certainly be a good way to rest, but the sorts of involvement UBC recommends lean more toward responsibilities than breaks. Event planning, starting initiatives, writing an opinion column on advertised degree lengths, club management and other such work are often demanding tasks that support UBC in creating a campus culture that is rich and full of opportunities. Take the hundreds, if not thousands, of students running the over 400 AMS clubs that drive a lot of campus social networks. When I was a club executive, I spent around 10 hours a week on that work plus another 5 hours to participate in the club normally.

So, students are expected to work over 60 hours a week and have meaningful involvement in campus activities, all while managing to sleep, do chores and possibly commute due to the relatively low supply of on-campus housing. This is all before they get to enjoy time with their friends or just have some downtime to recover, allowing them to recharge for their studies and perhaps even engage with the diversity of people, natural landscapes and things to do on campus and in Vancouver that UBC understandably loves to brag about.

How does an undergraduate student, especially one leaving home for the first time and entering adulthood, manage to accomplish all that? Chances are, they let something go.

A student could not sleep enough to have more waking hours available for work, though this hurts their capacity to succeed in their academics and harms their health. Surely this is something UBC wants students to avoid.

Maybe that student could not get involved on campus, but surely UBC wants its students to gain valuable skills and experience in a way that strengthens its culture and community.

Instead, a student could opt not to take preventative measures for their mental health by finding meaning and taking time outside academics, or if they are one of the 34 per cent currently facing difficulties, opt not to address them. Even if UBC had adequate resources to address persistent difficulties, surely it wouldn’t want students to ignore their health and possibly let it get worse.

A student could even study less for their courses, reducing their workload but also the benefits they receive from their education and their ability to participate most effectively in class. UBC surely does not want its students to graduate and represent it as alumni with subpar skills, especially when students invest so much money for their studies.

Since students can’t magically make available on-campus housing exist, have their bills paid for them or even eliminate the infinitely regenerating adult responsibility that is chores, the only endorsable option left is to take fewer classes, which reduces their workload, offers them the full benefit of their time and money, and supports their health.

Students clearly have good reason to complete their degree over five years, and my analysis excludes other experiences promoted by UBC that can delay graduation, such as co-op (though UBC does quietly acknowledge on their co-op website that it tends to extend degrees). Programs with above-average workloads per credit or even higher credit loads give students further reason to study for longer than four years.

Thus, after giving UBC the benefit of the doubt with their expectations for course loads, wellbeing and involvement, we return to my previous conclusion that calling first-time bachelor’s degrees four-year programs is inaccurate. I also hope it is obvious that these students taking longer than four years, about three out of four students at UBC, are not lazy or entitled. A lot of students who take five years, including myself, want to learn the most from the UBC experience we’re so lucky to have. We just lack a way to make the day longer than 24 hours, our workloads negligible or our basic human needs a thing of the past.

UBC’s promotion of this gross inaccuracy has serious negative impacts. Students and their families who think the degree will take four years will naturally plan for four years worth of expenses. For students funding their studies with student loans or UBC bursaries, the requirement of taking at least a 60 per[]cent course load (or 80 per cent for Newfoundland loans) presumes the base, complete load as one that leads to graduation in four years. A 60 per cent load may not be so bad for students in programs where a full load is 30 credits per academic year, such as the Faculty of Arts BA or most BSc programs in the Faculty of Science. Yet many programs require more than 30 credits per year. At the highest end, the 100 per cent course load for the second year of a BASc in civil engineering is 45 credits (are you okay, second-year civil engineering students?).

Students who take fewer courses are further punished by the four-year expectation in risking disqualification from merit-based awards. For all undergraduate scholarships and hybrid awards based on academic merit, continuing students must have be registered in 24 percentage-graded credits for the current session when applying. The relevant Senate policy does waive this requirement for students with a reduced load approved by the Centre for Accessibility, but students who take fewer courses for reasons other than documented disabilities are automatically excluded. Dean’s List notations also require students to have completed 24, 27 or 30 percentage-graded credits in the relevant winter session to be eligible, depending on the faculty or program.

Beyond troubling finances and unreasonably high credit requirements for recognitions of merit, UBC contradicts the values of integrity, respect and accountability — its own guiding principles — in insisting that its first-time bachelor’s degrees are four-year programs. The dishonesty reflected in the easily demonstrable inaccuracy of the four-year timeline displays a lack of integrity, the failure to consider student financial needs displays a lack of respect and the false promise of four-years combined with the substantial nonobservance of its other self-ascribed values display a lack of accountability.

I would like to give solutions beyond listing first-degree bachelor’s programs as taking approximately five years, but anything smaller-scale would mean calling for the destruction of incredible programs at UBC or discouraging healthy habits. Conversely, it is highly unrealistic to ask UBC to eliminate tuition or resolve the economic problems that force students to work on top of their studies.

The standard advertised length for bachelor’s degrees at Canadian universities may be four years. Yet if UBC wants to consider itself a leader in our country’s higher education, it should actually lead by being transparent about its programs.

The change would also be another chance for UBC to brag about the rigour of its courses and the many opportunities it offers its students throughout their undergraduate experience, all while switching to truth in advertising.

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