A report in this week's Campus.News indicates that Rensselaer plans to alter the way graduate students pay their tuition. Key in this proposal is the idea that graduates would pay a flat tuition, like undergraduates do, and no longer pay on a per credit basis. The plan also calls for financial aid and payment for work by graduate students to be restructured.

An interesting article about this proposal has been published in the February 13 edition of The Poly. A number of professors are concerned that this policy would hurt research projects on campus, if it were implemented. But, the article also states that graduate students often have to sign up for zero credit hours for one or more semesters in order to fulfill non-course-related degree requirements. This is a practice known as "degree completion".

What is degree completion, in reality, and why does the Poly call the process "the primary reason that RPI takes an average of 1.5 years longer to graduate a Ph.D. student, and one year longer for master’s candidates"?