When I went to college, the assumption was that only those who were the smartest deserved a higher education, and would get state support if they had little money.
But weak students also pay taxes, or at least their families do. So is this a form of elitism, with the weak students families getting stuck with the smart kids’ bills?
In general most state higher education systems have institutions which are designed to be more or all “open” to just about anyone in the state. There are also institutions which are slightly selective, in that you need to have some very low minimum score on the SAT/ACT to be admitted. Then the state higher education system will also have institutions which are highly selective and only admit the best applicants.
I think under such a system, poor applicants shouldn’t be admitted to the more selective schools. And since options exist for them to get a college education, you can’t really justify forcing more selective public institutions to lower their standards on the basis of providing just opportunity to receive college education.
From a social benefit mindset, entry to college should be a strict meritocracy; the people who are admitted are those who have the most to gain and most to offer back for the investment of grants, loans, and scholarship by higher education. Admitting students are are going to be weak or above their capabilities intellectually benefits no one.
As a matter of practice, many “good students” in high school go on to do little or nothing worthwhile in college or after, while many mediocre students do well, or at least well enough, to go out into the world and be productive. Without a crystal ball and a rigorous standard of what comprises “productive” (medicine? engineering? science? education? law? literary criticism?), it’s essentially impossible to determine this beforehand, so standardized testing and previous academic performance, along with extracurricular activies are used to assess this. Whether this is an effective method or not is up for question, but you have to pick and choose somehow.
You can call such winnowing and selection “elitism” if you like, but in a game with scarce resources, the optimal solution is to allocate said resources to the most promising candidates. This is called “life”.
Stranger
We used to joke, here, that “anyone with a pulse and an in-state permanent address can get in.” That doesn’t mean they can stay in, though.
Short of really disastrous high school performance, my state-run institution of higher education does admit basically anyone who can find a way to pay their tuition, and it’s meritocracy after that. The science and engineering programs have enormous freshman drop-out rates.
They’re called community colleges. They give any student, no matter how bad they did in high school (or even if they finished it since many CCs have GED programs) a chance to prove themselves capable of higher education.
One could argue that everyone benefits from having a well educated population, even those individuals who do not or cannot pursue that education for themselves. Highschool drop-out Joe Blow may be paying taxes to support colleges he’ll never attend, but those colleges are turning out the engineers, doctors, scientists, and artists who make the world around him both livable and worth living in.
Another view of this is that many, many jobs these days require degrees, or at least give preference to those with degrees.
Should weaker students be kept from pursuing astrophysics or chemistry degrees? Certainly. Should weaker students be kept from the type of degree which will enable them to be productive worker drones at a decent salary? Absolutely not.
Let them have their shot; they’ll make it or they won’t.
>Should weaker students be kept from the type of degree which will enable them to be productive worker drones at a decent salary? Absolutely not. Let them have their shot; they’ll make it or they won’t.
If the “type of degree” you mean is a college one, I disagree. To “let them have their shot” allocates a scarce resource that we can’t afford for everyone. Maybe giving them one semester is 1/8 as expensive as giving them the entire ride. I think ideally society should include career paths for people that are only “productive worker drones” and it’d be surprising that college was an entrance requirement for these - but even if it were, giving a shot to people who won’t survive the journey doesn’t fix this anyway.
My brother is a math professor at a large state university, and he says that over the years, reduced admissions standards have made things worse for everybody.
He has to teach remedial material to the students who aren’t prepared, which means he has less time to spend teaching the students who are prepared.
And the unprepared ones aren’t being done a favor in the long run – they’re out the tuition, and often in debt for it.
The only people who benefit are the university administrators. They piously champion the principle of universal education, but are really just happy with the increased ‘market share’ made possible by admitting anyone with a pulse and a high school diploma.
While it’s a good feature of the US system that a person’s future isn’t determined solely by the time they’re 17, I believe it would be better if there were more filters in the system. E.g., raising admission standards at four-year institutions, while leaving the community colleges easier to get into. That way, a motivated student could prove themself at a CC before being admitted to a more difficult (and selective) school.
Not to mention the pressure on professors to pass students who really don’t deserve it.
I think this would be fair only if we make a concerted effort to improve secondary education. Shunting students from bad high schools to community college while feeding students from good high schools to selective 4-year institutions creates another hurdle for disadvantaged students…one that they aren’t necessarily responsible for. I think it’s the duty of public universities to work with local school districts to ensure that all state residents have the opportunity to reap the educational benefits provided by that university. If they do that, then I think they are entitled to do all the “filtering” they want, within reason.
Many of my students were not great high school students. Their best learning style is kinesthetic, not visual or auditory. When classes are taught with attention to multiple learning styles, they do great. High school performance and test scores are not the only indicators of who would benefit from college and, in turn, benefit others.
Unfortunately, you have to start much earlier than secondary school. No?
But why is it the responsibility of the State University to fix the HS system in that state? Shouldn’t it be the responsibility of the state government and/or the people of the state? The best universtities can’t be open to everyone who wants to get in-- they have to use some selection criteria, and while I can agree that raw test scores don’t tell the whole story, whatever criteria are used, lots of applicants are going to be rejected.
I’m not that familiar with the state college/university system in other states, but here in CA the cummunity colleges are quite good, the state colleges are very good and the state universities are excellent. And it’s pretty common to start at one of the less selective schools and then transfer to a better school if you do well there. This isn’t to say that eveything is fair and square, but I don’t see how adding the burden of improving HS academic levels to what these colleges and universities already have to do makes much sense.
Yes, K-12 education in the US needs lots of work, but let’s put the onus where it belongs-- on the state as a whole.
I like how they do it here in California. The public schools can be very good and highly selective. To give an example, the average University of California, Berkeley freshman had an average of 3.8 and scored 650 in each section of the SAT in addition to plenty of involvement in extra curricular activities and volunteer work. In addition to the top ranked schools there are many other Universities scattered throughout the state which have varying degrees of selectiveness. But, an education at Berkeley is not out of the reach of a poor high school performer because of the excellent Community Colleges.
While elsewhere, community colleges are typically seen as a black mark on the student’s education record, the Universities of California and the California State Universities give preferrance to transfer students coming from community colleges even over high performing high school students. The reason they do this is because community college is a lot more inexpensive than the UCs or CSUs. Universities will often encourage students to attend community colleges for the first two years of their education due to the lower education costs. The registration and fees for a semester at my community college costs about 300 compared to Berkeley at about 8000. This low price of $20 per unit at community colleges makes an education very affordable and accessible for even low income students. It’s amazingly easy to apply for financial aid if you are low income, I didn’t even have to go to the school. When I filled out my FASFA online, the next time I went to register for class, I found that it all had been waived except for a $19 health fee.
I wasn’t very highly motivated when I was in high school so I didn’t do as well as I could’ve. I had decent scores, but nothing good enough to get into Berkeley or an Ivy League. At my community college the class is taught basically identical to how it would be at a UC or CSU with one important difference - the class size is much smaller. I’ve accomplished a lot more this time around and I’ve now got a very good shot at all the UCs and even some Ivy Leagues. Should I have been kept from these good colleges the first time? Absolutely, I simply wasn’t ready to focus at school. Should a bad high school performance have barred me from these colleges forever? These colleges don’t seem to think so, otherwise they wouldn’t have such good transfer programs. Although there is some correlation, a weak high school performance does not absolutely show that a student would not do well in very competitive schools. I think it would be wasteful to relax the standards at the good public universities, instead, we should focus on improving the community colleges so that a student has a chance to prove themselves again. If a student does not do well in a community college, then it is almost assured that they will not do well at a University.
Absolutely not, IMHO. I think the true beauty of the American higher educational system is that there is an assumption that anyone who wants to go to college should have the opportunity to do so. I honestly think the openness of this approach is a wonderful thing. On the other hand, I do not think there should be any effort on the part of the college to lower its standards to make it easier for the weaker students. It’s up to the student to figure out whether college is right for them.
Does it make it more difficult for instructors and administration? Absolutely. We have to put more effort into understanding weaker students, and shepherding them along (to a point.) But, IMHO, that’s part and parcel to being a teacher. I am currently teaching freshmen (read, I’m a graduate TA) at a college that has one of the best research medical schools in the world. We have the 5th best AIDS research institute in the nation, the 8th best women’s health institute, and in overall quality, we tie the Mayo Medical School and Case Western. In other technical biological disciplines, we rank 10th for microbiology, and we’re one of the leading research centers for Antarctic biology.
I teach a biology lab that is designed to weed out weaker students from the program. It’s a lot of trouble. We hit them with vast amounts of information. Taxonomy, histology, anatomy, lots of organismal biology. We hit them with a test every week. They do dissections. They do organismal and ecological experiments from which we expect them to write full-on scientific papers. They write up case studies. One of the course professors recently told me that the point of the class is to be “brutal.” Basically, we get lots of kids in who think they’re going to be doctors. Part of our job is to disabuse them of this notion. I have kids who have made less than a third of the available points for the semester, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. It gives them the opportunity to see what kind of masses of info they’re going to have to learn if they want to get a medical degree from us.
And there’s always the possibility that simply because they aren’t suited for the medical field, or the biological field, that does not mean they won’t excel in some other academic field. I think it’s terribly important to grant anyone who wants it the opportunity to be educated, even with the disadvantages. IMO, this is what has made the American higher educational system one of the best in the world.
Ogre: Good policy. I couldn’t believe how many incoming freshmen in my first year of college signed up for pre-med. Seemed like it was about 50% of the entire class. I shudder to think of some of those kids being doctors…
I have to agree with the above. My high school grades were so-so and I decided to attend Jr. College. With an A.A. degree I transferred into (then) CA state college and managed to get a B.A. Without the community college I wouldn’t have had a chance to get in to a four year school. (also had a lot of help from the G. I. bill)
I think it’s a good policy. It underlines the point that there is a lot of information out there they need to know, and we’re not going to let them slide on it. Doesn’t matter that they “only care about human biology, and whine whine whine.” We make sure they are aware of evolution and humans’ place in the greater scheme of things.
I agree that weaker students are never truly kept out of college now if that is what they truly want. My SIL was a hippie and dropped out of high school at 16 and moved to California to get married. Ten years later she decided that she wanted to become a Chemical Engineer so she enrolled in community college and went straight through to a degree at the state university. She later got breast cancer and figured that it was the work environment so she made her way to a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and she is now a professor. Not bad for someone that never finished high school.
As a matter of fact, my brother was expelled from his senior year of high school because of one of those zero tolerance BS things you read about. He enrolled in community college right away and then went straight to LSU where he did well and even got himself on the police department as a full police officer and even though he is taking his time, he will graduate within a year with most of his degree paid for.
Both my mother and stepfather got their doctorates after age 50 fully paid for and they both use them fully today. My stepfather is a professor and my mother is an international motivational speaker in education.
I don’t think that anyone is truly blocked from anything that they want at this point and opening the doors further just amounts to passing out pieces of paper to all comers and that is not what we want. The opportunity is there for virtually anyone that wants it. If they have the brains and the sense to deserve the degree in the first place, they should be able to figure out how to do it.
Maybe it varies from state to state, but finals for a lot of subjects like English Comp, Chemistry, etc. are state exams that you have to pass and are the same regardless of what school you attend. So while community colleges may be easier to get in, you still have to pass the same exam.