Used to be 3 years. Freshmens had to play on the freshmens team.
Does the average student really take 5 years to graduate? Why? Only have to take 128 hours.
I cannot speak for other universities, but I found that with my child (a recent graduate), MSU manipulates the system such that a student is unlikely to finish in 4 years unless the student also goes to summer school. Bottom line, MSU games the system to make sure students spend more money and/or time at the university. Whether intentionally or not, here is how it happens.
In the old days (before Y2K), there was not a comprehensive, electronic registration system. Therefore, pre-requisites were not strictly enforced, so if a particular class needed by a student was full in a given semester, the student could register for a different required class (even though the student may not have the pre-requisite). Nowadays, pre-requisites are strictly enforced by the software. The university frequently has required classes scheduled such that they overlap one another. Even though taking 16 hours per semester should get you out in 4 years without summer school, the required classes overlap enough or there are too few sections and all are full. This means a student must take hours that will not help toward graduation in order to maintain full time student status OR the student must drop back to part time.
As an example, suppose a first semester Sophomore student needs to take CC 2133 which is a prerequisite for 3 other classes. Each of those 3 classes is a prerequisite for another class. Suppose further that all sections of CC 2133 are full in the fall and CC 2133 is not taught in the spring. The student is then in quite a bind because he/she cannot move forward until he/she takes the CC2133 class. This has a ripple effect and delays the student's opportunity to schedule required classes. This type example happened to my child several times resulting in my child having to attend two summer school semesters plus an additional fall and spring semester. Because the university did not properly schedule classes and had strict prerequisites, my child's education cost about $10,000 more than it should have.