How many universities have switched from a quarter system to a semester system?
Haven't you ever wondered?
This past Saturday, I was watching the Indiana Hoosiers volleyball team rage against the dying of the light as they dynamically lost to Oregon. The game was in Eugene, and I noticed that the arena’s attendance seemed strangely sparse given the Big Ten matchup.
The announcer explained the vacancies in the student section by saying that it was freshman move-in weekend.
Wait, freshmen were moving in on September 30th?
A quick search revealed an unexpected answer: the University of Oregon is on the quarter system.
Today, I’d like to explain a little bit about what that means. Then I’ll describe how I answered some of my followup questions about where the quarter system stands in higher education today.
What is the quarter system?
I won’t belabor this point because you’re just as capable of reading a Wikipedia article as I am. A quarter system is just what it sounds like: it divides the academic year into four even pieces.
Most colleges operate on the semester system. This typically has a 16-week fall semester and another 16-week spring semester. The summer may have course offerings of various lengths.
In a quarter system, there are four terms, usually lasting around ten weeks each. Oregon’s schedule is a good example. Students arrive in late September in order to finish their first quarter before winter break. This also pushes commencement to mid-June, a full month after most other universities.
The quarter system gained momentum in the 1960’s as an adaptation to the influx of Baby Boomers. The idea, as I understand it, was that some institutions were struggling to adapt to the number of new students. The quarter system allowed them to admit classes of freshmen at different points in the year, spreading out the load and allowing incoming students at different points of the year to take the places of those who transferred or dropped out.
Once infrastructure on these campuses grew to adapt to larger class sizes, some of this incentive went away. As undergraduate enrollment began to decline by the late 70’s, the driving imperative for the quarter system mostly faded with it.
In reading a little about it, I found some modern justifications. For example, it makes short-term study abroad programs easier to organize. Or it encourages students to experiment with electives they’re curious about without having to commit to the full sixteen weeks.
But the common complaint is just that it’s unusual. It makes it hard to be part of national programs that assume you’re operating on a semester calendar. It can put you at odds with your in-state peers.
Mostly, it’s just weird. And administrators can be afraid to be seen as weird when they’re competing for every student enrollment.
This made me ask just how many institutions still use the quarter system. I also wanted to know how this compared to the past and whether many had switched from quarters to a semester calendar.
The wondrous world of IPEDS
For many large-scale questions comparing higher education institutions, the best place to begin is IPEDS. This is a federal data repository which is free to use. It draws its information from reports submitted by any institution which receives federal aid.
It’s not universal, but it’s pretty close. And while there are some inconsistencies because the data is submitted by the institutions themselves, typically without an audit, it’s a great place to start asking questions.
I had decided to find out how many institutions use the quarter system and how many used to do so. But first I had to decide how to define which “institutions” I was interested in.
I generated a custom data file to start defining which group of institutions I would review. I thought it might be interesting to compare public and private colleges to see if there were trends between them.
For simplicity, I excluded “for-profit” colleges so that I was only looking at public vs private non-profit schools. Additionally, I excluded institutions that were primarily 2-year colleges (i.e. community/junior colleges) and those that did not offer bachelor’s degrees (like independent medical schools). As much as possible, I wanted to limit the analysis to programs that were, broadly speaking, doing the same kind of education.
I also only looked at institutions which were still open in 2023. There might be some defunct colleges which had used the quarter system, but I wanted to ensure I could compare “then and now.” That is harder to do if there’s no “now.”
This culling left me with 1,659 colleges and universities to analyze.
Here comes the numbers part
You can view or download a copy of my summary spreadsheet here if you want.
One of the many data points IPEDS tracks is “calendar system.” This is an old data point, so I could see it back to the 1984 results. The issue is that IPEDS did not become mandatory for aid recipients until after 1992. This means there is a lot of missing information in the 1984 survey. I decided to use the 1994 data as a starting point as it presented a more robust data set.
Here’s what I found:
In 1994, 149 of these 1,659 institutions were using a quarter system. That’s about 9.7% of all schools.
Of those, 75 were public and 74 were private. With 529 public colleges, that means that 14.2% used a quarter system in 1994. Of 1130 private institutions, 6.6% were on the quarter system.
So, while their overall numbers were similar, the lower total number of public universities means that quarter system institutions made up a larger share of the public sector than quarter system programs did on the private side.
How do these numbers look today?
98 of the 149 quarter system colleges from 1994 had switched to a semester system by 2023. That’s 65.7%.
By 2023, the overall numbers between public and private remained close. There are 23 public programs using the quarter system and 28 private.
This means the share of public colleges using the quarter system decreased from 14.2% to 4.4% by 2023. The private share declined from 6.6% to 2.5%.
Okay, the numbers are going down. So what?
I mean, I don’t know
I am not sure if I should lament the decline of the quarter system. Before looking into this, 3% of colleges operating on a quarter system would have sounded bigger than I expected.
Part of the quarter system remaining as common as it is is due to the unusual shape of the public side. If you look at the 23 public institutions on the quarter system, 22 of them are in just three states: California, Oregon, and Washington. Louisiana Tech is the lone public representative outside the Pacific coast.
The system is nearly universal in Oregon and Washington. In California, it’s quickly disappearing with Cal Poly-SLO switching to semesters in 2026 and the other UC system holdouts not far behind.
Oregon and Washington may persist longer, but if one of their state flagships makes the shift to “align with their national peer institutions,” I’d imagine the regional colleges would follow suit.
This would be in line with general trends toward homogenization in higher education. Fearing enrollment cliffs, loss of public confidence, and political ire, universities and colleges are inclined to shore up their defenses and try to protect their solvency at all costs. This usually means trying to look more like the “successful” colleges and not do anything that could cause a student or stakeholder to turn against them.
I have no particular love for the quarter system. But I do love that it’s a little bit weird. The institutions using it are making a statement, claiming to know something that other schools don’t.
Higher education will be okay if the quarter system disappears. But having institutional divergence of some kind is still important. If universities only ever mimic one another, where will structural innovations come from?
-Matt