LOL Not on any social media site on the Internet. I didn't discover Internet forums until 2017.
Well, academic advisors, despite their title, have as a main priority ensuring students graduate. Secondarily is to see them do so in four years or as near to it as possible. Naturally, doing that requires giving students "empirical" input about what to take, what "this or that" discipline entails, who are better and worse teachers, etc. The dimension of AA's job performance that pertains to graduate rates and whatnot is called "academic outcomes achieved." There's an element of relativity to an AA's performance on that criterion, but overall it's highly quantifiable. It's usually described as the extent to which an AA's advisees "develop an educational plan that leads to the timely completion of their educational goals." No AA is going to openly state that that is a key metric in their annual performance review, but it is.
For the most part, schools that graduate their students in four years are schools that overall have the highest performing student bodies. Every school has someone one the "six year plan" for a bachelor's degree, but one of the admissions department's goals is to screen for students who might be of a mind to do that and not admit them, that's especially the case at schools that consider themselves to be or want to be seen as "highly competitive." Some potential signs of that sort of scholastic behavior of that sort:
- really high scores in high school or on the SAT/ACT, but not both.
- higher than 4.0 high school GPA while not performing well enough on AP exams to earn college credit.
Schools will admit a few such "eccentric" kids, but not many. Non traditional age students/applicants don't generally get considered that way, mainly because of the presumption of maturity, thus commitment, associated with returning to school at a slightly older age. (Returning adults are great students for colleges. They want to get in, do what needs to be done, do it well, and get the hell up out of there so they can move on with their lives.) The same concept tends to apply to "genius" kids who enter college earlier than "normal." They've been "in a hurry" all their lives; there's no reason to think they suddenly will stop being so.
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