Gambling on Open Admissions

Jammed with 190,000 students, the 18 campuses of New York City's municipal university last week looked like 18 Grand Central stations during the height of rush hour. Classes met in auditoriums and converted storefronts, a synagogue and a onetime indoor hockey rink. With surprising fervor, the City University of New York (CUNY) had set out to help break the poverty cycle of young people--both white and black --who graduate with serious educational deficiencies from the city's high schools each year. Under its new "open admissions" policy, CUNY was taking such students despite their academic shortcomings, even admitting some of them directly into its four-year colleges.

It was the biggest such effort in U.S. history. Tests showed some of the new matriculants reading and doing math at barely ninth-grade level. Vice President Agnew has termed the scheme "new socialism." In a speech last April, he predicted that by admitting students "who do not meet the standards and requirements of higher education," New York "will have traded away one of the intellectual assets of the Western world for a four-year community college and 100,000 devalued diplomas." Some angry parents see open admissions as a giveaway of an opportunity that their children had to earn by academic merit.

All Comers. In fact, open admissions is hardly a new idea. For years, even Ivy League colleges accepted many whose only qualification was that they could pay the tuition. Only the poor had to fight for entrance, by competing for scholarships. Stringent selections began in earnest after World War II, when U.S. colleges were deluged with applicants. But many state universities continued to admit all high school graduates, then flunked out droves of dullards; most institutions made exceptions for athletes and alumni sons. All comers have been welcome at most of the two-year community colleges that now enable 60% of high school graduates to attend some kind of college.

Given current admissions standards, though, putting disadvantaged kids directly into four-year colleges is daring indeed. The CUNY staff readily concedes that the university is living dangerously. "This is a break in the notion that merit alone counts for admission," says Vice-Chancellor Timothy S. Healy. "Our critics say we're changing the rules of the game, and we are. We believe in giving second chances. The day is over when this society can afford to tell a kid that simply because he's had trouble with English and math, he can never get beyond high school."

Racial agitation helped push CUNY into that stance. Last year black and Puerto Rican militants closed down the university's well-known City College for two weeks, demanding among other things the admission of more minority students. "We could have withstood the political pressure and the violence for two more years, but only with a lot of academic double talk and finagling," says Healy. Instead, the university's deceptively soft-spoken Chancellor Albert H. Bowker and a unanimous Board of Higher Education decided to outpace the militants, speed up expansion plans by five years, and offer a place to every city high school graduate who wanted one this fall.

The change increased CUNY's already huge freshman class of 19,000 to more than 35,000 students. The university now enrolls at least every other 1970 high school graduate in New York City. More than 9,000 of the new freshmen could not meet last year's admission standards for a four-year college: a minimum grade average of 82% at one of New York's better high schools. Under the new system, students may enter CUNY's nine senior colleges with an average of 80% or a rank in the top half of their class at any high school. Since low scores on reading and math tests are not held against them, the net effect is a deliberate break for those who went to poor high schools. Significantly, 50% of the students who have been admitted only as a result of open admissions are white, a fact that makes CUNY officials confident of broader public support than many critics predicted.

Time to Finish. Not all of the "high-risk" students will flood onto the system's four-year campuses. Half will follow the pattern made famous by the California educational system and attend one of CUNY's seven two-year community colleges. University officials decided that to send all of the high risks to these campuses--the strategy that Agnew and other critics favor--would reinforce the discouragement of many black students and their teachers and prolong de facto segregation.

Acknowledging fears that the expansion would scare off outstanding students, Bowker redoubled recruiting efforts and succeeded in attracting the same proportion of academic whiz kids that the university has boasted in past years. To keep the disadvantaged students from dragging down academic standards, the university is giving them as much time as they need to finish, plus a stiff dose of remedial courses. The catch-up work will not count toward a degree. Bowker insists: "We will not award college degrees for anything except college-level work."

The goal, in short, is to challenge high-risk freshmen to outreach themselves, and last week many of them seemed ready to try. Margaret Sias, a 27-year-old black mother of four with a diploma in "beauty culture" from a Mississippi high school, enrolled "because I'm tired of working in the five-and-dime. Regardless of color, we poor people want to get out of our rut and help others around us start moving." Said Nancy Vincenty, who had planned on being a clerk-typist before she heard of open admissions: "If you want to go to college and don't think you'll ever be able to, and suddenly you get the chance, you really work extra hard to stay there."

$50 a Week. CUNY has had more experience with work programs than most universities: for the past four years it has run two programs for disadvantaged students called SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) and College Discovery. Though most of the SEEKERS had had high school problems, intensive counseling and stipends of as much as $50 per week have enabled roughly 40% of them to earn diplomas of some kind--a figure not much lower than the 50% of traditionally qualified U.S. students who complete their work. Still, this year's high-risk students will be hard pressed to do as well.

One problem is CUNY money. Due to an underestimate of enrollment, the university's $322 million budget is adequate for only 30,000 freshmen instead of the estimated 35,000 now signed up. With backing from labor unions, who see open admissions as a boon for their members' children, the state and city will probably provide all the funds that Bowker needs. But until the money comes through, the university's 1,000 new teachers and guidance counselors will be far from sufficient. It will take longer to unjam the classrooms. Construction is so slow that the shortage of space will not let up for another two years.

Unpardonable Sin. Despite Bowker's determination to keep high standards, critics feel that some dilution of quality must eventually appear in even the best-funded and -staffed open-admissions program. Guaranteed admissions, they argue, may lead to insidious pressures for guaranteed diplomas. At the moment the biggest worry is how to keep many students from dropping out, but "20% of these kids get a degree," says Vice-Chancellor Healy. "That's 20% above zero." Even those who earn two-year degrees will benefit the city, which sorely needs trained people in fields ranging from medicine to police work.

If the CUNY experiment works, it will almost certainly set a pattern for other urban campuses. "Failure is possible," Bowker conceded last week. But at a time when the gap between blacks and whites is widening, he added, "the unpardonable sin would have been for us not to try."

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