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I have a friend who teaches community college, and he says you would not believe how inadequate and uninterested the students are.
And since when is it a top colleges mission to have a better relationship with the rest of the country?
Should Ivy League Schools Randomly Select Students (At Least For A Little While)?
By Ginia Bellafante
When she assumed the office of the presidency at Brown University in 2001, Ruth Simmons said in an inauguration speech that it was an important goal of hers to bring more community college students to the university. Throughout her 11-year tenure, Dr. Simmons, now the president of Prairie View A&M in Texas (a historically Black college to which MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, pledged a $50 million gift this week) tried to push her colleagues in the Ivy League to open themselves to these nontraditional students.
“I would say, ‘If we were to collectively agree to make space for community college students, think of how much better our relationship to the rest of the country would be,’” she told me. But it proved to be a difficult road. “The noise from people who feel entitled to Harvard or Brown is tremendous.”
For decades, struggling community colleges have done the hard work of remediation for students coming out of high schools ill equipped to give them the skills they need to thrive after graduation. What if that work, all too often stymied by a punishing lack of resources, shifted instead to schools with multibillion-dollar taxpayer-subsidized endowments?
Seriously? The nation's top college should be used for remedial education for those who can't handle college level material?
Let's send our best students to Podunk Community College and send those who could barely pass high school to Harvard. What could possibly be wrong with this idea?
GIven admissions are test optional this year, admissions are going to end up being a little bit more random anyway. Are students who aren't submitting scores doing it because they got low scores but don't want to reveal them or are they the students who might have had really high scores but their ACT and SAT tests were repeatedly canceled due to COVID? There will be some of both and top universities won't know who is from which group.
Should Ivy League Schools Randomly Select Students (At Least For A Little While)?
By Ginia Bellafante
When she assumed the office of the presidency at Brown University in 2001, Ruth Simmons said in an inauguration speech that it was an important goal of hers to bring more community college students to the university. Throughout her 11-year tenure, Dr. Simmons, now the president of Prairie View A&M in Texas (a historically Black college to which MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, pledged a $50 million gift this week) tried to push her colleagues in the Ivy League to open themselves to these nontraditional students.
“I would say, ‘If we were to collectively agree to make space for community college students, think of how much better our relationship to the rest of the country would be,’” she told me. But it proved to be a difficult road. “The noise from people who feel entitled to Harvard or Brown is tremendous.”
No one is 'entitled' i.e. that's the whole point to an extensive/rigorous process relative to admittance. I'm all for (continued/increased) scrutiny re: legacy students, but not by way of a decline in standard for (any of) the remaining two-thirds of the (potential) student population.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tnff
Let's send our best students to Podunk Community College and send those who could barely pass high school to Harvard. What could possibly be wrong with this idea?
College admissions, especially at the elite level, is already basically a random process, so officially making it a random lottery won't really change anything.
My high school had several teachers who taught AP Bio. The teacher that I had made it almost impossible to get an A, and he outright refused to give B+ or C+ regardless of your grades. Another AP Bio teacher gave an A to basically any student. Many of the students who had the easy teacher had GPA's above 4.0 and got into Ivy League schools. The students with the hard teacher mostly did not get into Ivy League schools, and that one grade was just about the only thing separating us. Basically a random lottery that I lost on my first day of 10th grade.
On the other hand, there was a really nice girl who had a 4.0 but did not get into Ivy League schools, even though there was seemingly nothing separating her from the people who did get into Ivy League schools. Again, random lottery.
There was also a white male student who was 1/16 Hispanic, who got into Ivy League schools by checking the Hispanic box on the applications. His appearance and his name were very obviously non-Hispanic, and was in a mostly white high school. Again, random lottery.
I should mention that my post above was based on the assumption that only students who are "qualified" for the college would be entered into the lottery.
Also, any time that there is a resource where demand exceeds supply (in this case, elite college admissions), whatever method is used to determine who wins and who loses is going to seem unfair and arbitrary to whoever loses.
This seems to be coming from the same misplaced notion that any perceived inequality should be corrected by giving minorities special treatment. There seems to be a lot of this going on in the academic community, which seems totally oblivious to how the post-academic world really works.
This approach is not a matter of 'leveling the playing field' (giving all the same opportunities). Instead, it artificially attempts to change the past, by boosting the less qualified ahead of those who actually have the requisite qualifications.
IMO, it's the same mindset that is widely attempting to 're-write history' by making it more reflective of today's more liberal values and standards. It's creating desired 'appearances,' while ignoring how things were/are (including how they were reported). It's like the old axiom of 'putting lipstick on a pig.'
The content of the article was slightly different than the title. I don’t necessarily see a problem with schools establishing a base criteria for community college students to apply and then picking randomly from there. I know a lot of people who started in community college and were ultimately successful in going to undergrad and getting graduate degrees. Presumably at the point where they are about to finish the two-year degree, anyone unqualified would have been weeded out.
I don’t agree that there should be a free-for-all random admission though.
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