When Being a Valedictorian Isn’t Enough... (New York, York: middle-class, 2015)
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An increasing emphasis on SAT scores is making it harder for students from immigrant and minority families to get into New York City's best public colleges.
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The changes began when CUNY’s new chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, was given a mandate in 1999 to rehabilitate the university, which had been battered for decades by budget cuts, political infighting, and social unrest. By the time he retired last year, Matthew Goldstein was widely acclaimed for increasing enrollment and retention, stabilizing the budget, attracting private donations, and improving the status of CUNY’s top five colleges. Headlines trumpeted his tenure with puns on his name: “Good as Goldstein” and “Pure Goldstein.”
But the prestige has come at a cost. Freshmen-admissions data confirm that the top-ranked senior colleges have admitted fewer and fewer black and Latino graduates as freshmen over the last decade. The students weren’t necessarily being bounced down into the second-tier four-year colleges—Lehman, John Jay, York, Staten Island, Medgar Evers, and City Tech. Those collective black and Latino enrollments fell off by 6 percent as well.
Meanwhile, there was a more than 60 percent increase in black and Latino freshmen in the system’s six community colleges, where students find it far more difficult to graduate. More than two-thirds end up leaving after four years. A 2011 study showed that a student who enters a CUNY community college has only an 8 percent chance of earning a bachelor’s degree at any school.
This race gulf widened most noticeably after the 2008 recession, when CUNY’s bargain tuition rates began drawing more middle-class families. Applications surged. That same year, CUNY hiked up its math SAT admission requirement 20 to 30 points for the five highly selective colleges. Department of Education records show that by 2012, the number of black public high school graduates accepted as freshmen into the system’s top five colleges had plummeted by 42 percent. Latinos dropped by 26 percent.
The decline happened alongside a sharp rise in minority high school graduation rates during the same time span: 7 percent for blacks, 20 percent for Hispanics. The racial skew became so pronounced that Baruch, the system’s business and science jewel, is now about 40 percent Asian. (In the city’s public schools, Asians represent less than 15 percent of the student body, while blacks and Latinos account for 70 percent.) Two years ago, only 7 percent of the students accepted to Baruch were African American, and fewer than half of them were graduates of city high schools."
It looks like that some CUNYs will catch up with 2nd tier schools like NYU in the next few years....but for a tiny fraction of tuition cost, once middle class students wake up to the reality that it is not at all worth of carrying a $200K+ of tuition debt to get a degree from big money suckers like NYU (no offense to the NYU alumni)...
This also proves the point that it is the student body who shapes the quality and reputation of a school...not the other way round.
Social media should start encouraging students/parents to pay more attention to go after public colleges, and give the private money suckers the least attention.
I truly applaud what is happening with the CUNY system...if the trend continues, we can expect a UC-equivalent college system here at home to render it more affordable for NYC residents to obtain quality college education without bleeding their future financial security.
This move will also push less meritful student populations into the community pools to enhance NYC CC reputations down the road.
An increasing emphasis on SAT scores is making it harder for students from immigrant and minority families to get into New York City's best public colleges.
"
The changes began when CUNY’s new chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, was given a mandate in 1999 to rehabilitate the university, which had been battered for decades by budget cuts, political infighting, and social unrest. By the time he retired last year, Matthew Goldstein was widely acclaimed for increasing enrollment and retention, stabilizing the budget, attracting private donations, and improving the status of CUNY’s top five colleges. Headlines trumpeted his tenure with puns on his name: “Good as Goldstein” and “Pure Goldstein.”
But the prestige has come at a cost. Freshmen-admissions data confirm that the top-ranked senior colleges have admitted fewer and fewer black and Latino graduates as freshmen over the last decade. The students weren’t necessarily being bounced down into the second-tier four-year colleges—Lehman, John Jay, York, Staten Island, Medgar Evers, and City Tech. Those collective black and Latino enrollments fell off by 6 percent as well.
Meanwhile, there was a more than 60 percent increase in black and Latino freshmen in the system’s six community colleges, where students find it far more difficult to graduate. More than two-thirds end up leaving after four years. A 2011 study showed that a student who enters a CUNY community college has only an 8 percent chance of earning a bachelor’s degree at any school.
This race gulf widened most noticeably after the 2008 recession, when CUNY’s bargain tuition rates began drawing more middle-class families. Applications surged. That same year, CUNY hiked up its math SAT admission requirement 20 to 30 points for the five highly selective colleges. Department of Education records show that by 2012, the number of black public high school graduates accepted as freshmen into the system’s top five colleges had plummeted by 42 percent. Latinos dropped by 26 percent.
The decline happened alongside a sharp rise in minority high school graduation rates during the same time span: 7 percent for blacks, 20 percent for Hispanics. The racial skew became so pronounced that Baruch, the system’s business and science jewel, is now about 40 percent Asian. (In the city’s public schools, Asians represent less than 15 percent of the student body, while blacks and Latinos account for 70 percent.) Two years ago, only 7 percent of the students accepted to Baruch were African American, and fewer than half of them were graduates of city high schools."
The article is extremely short on details. What did he get on his SATs, and regents? If he has a 90 average and 80s/90s on his regents I would find it hard to believe that even with a 450/450 verbal/math on his SATs he'd be rejected by all senior CUNYs. Reporters nowadays will go above and beyond to hide facts just to push their agenda. I suspect that his grades were more along the lines of 90s in classes, high 60s to low 70s in regents exams and low to mid 400s in each part of his SATs. CUNYs have had their fair share of low performing students with low SAT scores I doubt that they would deny admissions to anyone who can prove themselves as a solid B/B+ student so I call this article total BS.
Last edited by bumblebyz; 01-15-2015 at 09:54 AM..
I truly applaud what is happening with the CUNY system...if the trend continues, we can expect a UC-equivalent college system here at home to render it more affordable for NYC residents to obtain quality college education without bleeding their future financial security.
This move will also push less meritful student populations into the community pools to enhance NYC CC reputations down the road.
Go support public education!!
This will not happen. The demographics of top schools will not be politically acceptable in NYC.
But it is happening...and I predict that Baruch is on the rise to become a Berkeley in NYC in the coming decade, shall the trend continues...
I don't know man. I do like the idea of giving poor, but extremely bright kids a chance to excel independent the color of their skin color. But there will be artificial limits to the demographics. Look at the fuss with the specialized high schools. With CUNYs it'll be much easier to apply pressure to limit the number of Asians in those school if it gets out of hand. As long as Baruch isn't thought of as a top tier school racial politics may keep it's hands off from it. But it's only matter of time if this trend continues.
Another race baiting article. You can game a GPA easily by the quality of the school and its teachers. You can't game a standardized test. Do you know how easy it is to obtain and maintain a high GPA in a ****ty school? Ridiculous.
I just don't agree with the assumption that lower income kids are at a disadvantage for standardized tests because they can't afford prep courses. I never took any prep courses and still managed to score really high on my SATs. Perhaps I'm a rare genius but I doubt it. You don't need prep courses to do well on these tests. You do however, need a good high school education. So the kid in the article is a valedictorian for his high school but there is no mention whether the school is actually any good. This is why they use standardized tests.
The sad part of this is that the top five CUNYs -- Hunter, City, Baruch, Brooklyn, and Queens -- appear to be falling prey to the same silliness and bad educational practices as the specialized high schools, which is an over-reliance on standardized testing. Yes, they state that testing is just "one factor" in admissions in the article. But they're also quick to note how much they've "raised standards" by admitting students with higher SAT scores. And apparently they're not paying much attention to anything else; after all, the kid in the beginning of the story had the highest score on his AP Calculus test (presumably a 5) so we know he was a pretty smart cookie. Yet whatever other numbers he had just didn't cut it for the CUNY schools he wanted.
Bottom line: You can have a school with ethnic diversity, strong educational standards, and impressive outcomes if you take the time to admit students and not just test scores. The CUNY schools say that this is what they do, but the examples in this article are evidence that many times that just isn't true.
The happy part of this is that private schools are often eager to snap up kids like the ones in this story because they are not constrained by the stupid, test-dominated culture in NYC public education (at HS or college levels.) It costs these types of students more to attend a private college, even with substantial aid, than it does to go to a CUNY, and for family reasons some kids, like the boy at the end of this article, can't leave home for family reasons.
But I hope that more of these students manage to take advantage of the more discerning eye of private institutions and the often superior educational and personal opportunities they can offer. OVer the long term CUNY schools will lose a lot of talent, and frankly, with their admissions policies, it serves them right.
Last edited by citylove101; 01-15-2015 at 12:28 PM..
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