GW President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg urged the government to investigate the effects a trimester system would have on federal financial aid at a Senate committee hearing Tuesday.
Trachtenberg, who led an unsuccessful effort last year to persuade GW officials to adopt a year-round calendar system, testified at a hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Children and Families.
He called on Congress to appoint a commission to determine the feasibility of giving federal financial aid to students attending college in the summer. Currently, most federal loan and grant programs cannot be used for summer courses.
During his 10-minute testimony, Trachtenberg said universities would be able to generate more revenue and provide greater opportunities to students if they switched to a trimester, meaning they would provide a full class schedule in the summer while continuing to hold courses in the fall and spring.
Calling the current system of only holding classes in the fall, winter and spring “out of date,” Trachtenberg said higher education need to move away from a calendar that was implemented when farming dominated most Americans’ lives.
“The agrarian calendar was created to suit an agrarian world … (where) tending crops and livestock were more important than learning how to read,” he said.
If GW adopted a year-round calendar, it would be able to offer more courses and develop programs where students could graduate in three years with a bachelor’s degree, Trachtenberg said.
University officials abandoned plans to switch to a true trimester system in March 2003 after GW formed a committee to research alternative calendar options last winter. A proposal to institute a 10-week mandatory summer session for rising juniors was then effectively quashed by faculty dissent in October.
In a phone interview Wednesday, Trachtenberg said he anticipated that GW would revisit the possibility of adopting a year-round calendar in the next few years and that trimesters have become a national issue.
“When I put this idea to GW, I thought we could be a pioneer in this regard,” he said.
While more than 100 people packed a Dirksen Senate office room to hear the testimony of Trachtenberg and several other college administrators, only one senator, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, attended the hearing.
He suggested appointing a commission to determine whether the government should support a year-round academic calendar.
The only student to testify Tuesday about the year-round plan was Vanderbilt University senior India McKinney, who said a mandatory summer semester might prevent some students from earning some much-needed cash during that time.
She said the plan would be beneficial as long as a “choice, not as a requirement.”
“I like my summers in the real world,” said McKinney, who has spent her summers in Tennessee waiting tables at T.G.I. Friday’s and interning at her congressman’s office.
