How to graduate early from Columbia

I graduated in three years from Columbia College (the one in New York, not Chicago). To my knowledge, graduating a full year early and foregoing senior year is not a very popular course of action (*1) at elite private colleges, even though many students are perfectly capable of doing so. Some colleges (like Brown) don’t even allow it. Most colleges offer accelerated master’s degree programs to incentivize students to stay the fourth year or even stick around for a fifth or sixth.

Here is a short list of advice and reflections about this decision.

(0) Why graduate early? There are plenty of valid reasons; the obvious one being that, if you pay tuition, you are saving lots of money (either for yourself or your parents). But I think there’s more to it. If you know what you want to do after graduation, and your classes are becoming a distraction from that goal or even a general nuisance (which appears to be the case for many students by semester 5 or 6, according to my own observations), then you are saving time, your most valuable asset. On the other hand, I caution against early graduation if you do not have a good sense of next steps or career goals. If your career goals are in law, medicine, or academia, then I think early graduation is a great idea, since it allows you to streamline your entrance into grad school and potentially stand out among the applicant pool. If your career goals are in finance, tech, or consulting, then early graduation also might not make as much sense since it messes with the internship cycle (and once you get a job you can make up for the year of tuition rather quickly).

(1) Credit-Counting. You need 124 credits to graduate from Columbia College (128 for SEAS). If you enter CC with the maximum 16 AP credits, and take 18 credits per semester, then you can get your degree in six semesters. If you fluctuate around 18, you can petition to go above the credit limit. I personally frontloaded my classes in the early semesters and then had a light 13 credit final semester. You could also take summer classes but those are expensive and more rushed than the classes during the semester (and the selections, especially for advanced courses, are sparser).

(2) Send lots of reminders to the right people. Remember: colleges have no financial incentive to help you graduate early. Columbia did not have any webpage on the matter. There was essentially no formal guidance: and my status as a junior versus senior in my final year was unclear. The two main people to reach out to are: (1) your academic advisor, for basic questions about whether you are on track with credits; and (2) the dean of academic affairs, if you are interested in getting awards and recognitions traditionally given to seniors, like Phi Beta Kappa, etc.

(2) Masochism and FOMO. Many of my fellow students and even professors saw the decision to graduate early as masochistic. The belief I was consistently met with is that one should take their time in youth to explore oneself and one’s interests. The more time one can reasonably take to do that exploration, the better. It’s a fair argument, but we should recognize that people explore at different rates and in different ways. Taking classes is a wonderful thing, but it’s also a narrow form of exploration and it’s expensive in terms of time, money, and energy. Furthermore, if you’re going to graduate school, you have plenty of classwork ahead of you anyway. Perhaps it’s more specialized, and less liberal artsy, but I think three years of liberal arts is plenty (*2). There was another dimension of this criticism that focused on the social dimension of early graduation. By graduating early, you are leaving a very unique social environment, where you might have a close set of friends and making new friends is still quite easy. This social FOMO I find more compelling than the aforementioned liberal arts FOMO. But this is a problem for every graduation and career shift. There’s no simple answer. Make new friends, but keep the old.

(*1) According to this Columbia Spectator article, about three percent of CC students from 2012-17 (235/~7000) graduated early. This probably drops well below one percent for full-year-early graduates (I personally did not know anyone in the CC Class of 2024 who did so).

(*2) By this, I don’t mean to discredit the value of a liberal arts education. I think liberal arts encompasses a set of skills and values that one practices throughout one’s life. A liberal arts education, as I see it, is meant to introduce you to these modes of thinking. There are diminishing returns to this process of introduction. You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink.