Eastern’s Academic Affairs Department is taking steps toward implementing a guaranteed four-year graduation program similar to a system offered by Western Illinois University.

Provost Blair Lord said that while EIU-4, the proposed graduation incentive program, will be similar to programs at other universities, Eastern is not implementing EIU-4 because it feels compelled to compete with Western.

“We decided this would be good for Eastern,” he said. “It happens that Western does have such a program. They feel it’s been successful for them but we thought this was a good initiative for Eastern to take, with or without Western having a similar program. So it’s not keeping up with Western.”

Education and teacher certification programs will be exempted from EIU-4 along with cooperative engineering and possibly one or two other majors. Lord said similar programs tend to attract 10 to 20 percent of a university’s freshman class.

“It’s not something that, logically, everyone will want to participate in,” Lord told the Faculty Senate Tuesday, but he did say the program will provide an option for students and their parents who are interested in four-year degree completion.

For that reason, Lord said EIU-4 can positively impact Eastern’s recruitment efforts.

According to the current program proposal, interested students would have to meet with a counselor during orientation to discuss EIU-4. They would then have to sign an agreement and declare a major.

Once in the program, students must enroll in and maintain a load of 15 to 18 credit-hours per semester and fulfill other requirements, including regular meetings with an advisor. If a student follows the program’s stipulations and still does not graduate on time, Eastern will pay the student’s tuition for necessary classes beyond the four years.

Western implemented a similar program, dubbed Gradtrac, in the fall of 1998. Like Eastern’s program, students enrolled must meet regularly with their advisors and complete at least 15 course hours per semester. Western’s program also requires students to meet the minimum grade point average of their majors. Gradtrac also includes guidelines for students who change their majors.

“In many ways, I think the design of the program and the nature of the target audience is going to be relatively similar,” Lord said. “We are similar institutions in a whole host of dimensions and the ability to put together a graduation incentive guarantee program like this is going to have a lot of similarities.”

Cindy Draughan, Western’s Gradtrac coordinator, said that since the program has been started between 13 to 18 percent of incoming freshmen enroll in Gradtrac. Like Eastern’s proposed EIU-4 program, Gradtrac is open to students in most majors, but not education majors.

“It’s been a successful program here at the university,” she said, noting “parents are really excited about the program.”

If a student were to meet all of Gradtrac stipulations and still wasn’t scheduled to graduate on time, Draughan said Western has three possible ways to remedy the situation. The first is pay the student’s tuition for the additional course, the second would be to offer a substitute course and the third solution would be to have the student do an independent study.

A situation has yet to arise where Western would have to resort to one of those methods, but the university also has yet to graduate a class of Gradtrac students.

This spring Western will graduate the first class of students who entered into the program in 1998. Draughan said she has received positive feedback from the few students who have already graduated from the program early.