BACK TO SCHOOL: Those who have been away for years–or decades–need permission to return.

thinking of taking a quarter—even a year—off to work or travel or help out at home? No problem. The University wishes you well.

But stop out for 30 years, and you’ll need to ask permission to come back. Under a new policy, undergraduates who’ve been away from the Farm for more than two years have to apply to the University for reinstatement. (In the past—under rules so informal they weren’t even written down—undergrads in good standing could simply declare their intent to return, no questions asked.)

“Does the acceptance of an offer of admission give a person a lifetime grant to be at Stanford?” registrar Roger Printup muses. “I think it means you are going to complete a degree program in a reasonable amount of time, and four to six years seems reasonable. ”

Printup predicts that the number of students applying for reinstatement will be small—perhaps 10 or 20 per year. Of those, perhaps half will have been away for a really long time. “People who left Stanford 20 or 30 years ago, missing one course or one quarter—well, it nags at them,” he says. “It’s not that the lack of a Stanford degree has hindered their financial or professional progress, but it’s this missing piece in their lives. It ’s unfinished business.”

Undergraduates seeking reinstatement have to write a letter to the University that outlines what they’ve been doing, why they want to come back and what their academic plan is. If they’ve been taking classes elsewhere, they also need to submit transcripts. All students will be evaluated under today’s grading system—even if there was no such thing as an “F” when they left.

So far, so good: every request for reinstatement has been approved.

PS: Current students who are considering stopping out need to file for a leave of absence under the new policy. “In the past you could disappear,” says Printup. But today, “we need to plan what to expect. ”

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