Open Admissions: American Dream or Disaster?

ONLY a few years ago, most Americans heartily endorsed the nation's drive toward universal higher education. But now that 60% of U.S. high school graduates attend college, serious questions arise: What are colleges for? Who deserves admission? Or rejection? During the annual meeting of the American Council on Education in St. Louis last week, college presidents and administrators discussed a dramatic case in point: City University of New York and its new open-admissions policy. To some it seemed a triumph of democracy; to others, an omen that colleges may soon be overwhelmed with the "wrong" kind of students.

Tuition-free C.U.N.Y. has thrown open its doors this year to nearly any New York City high school graduate, regardless of his grades or the university's overburdened facilities. Even students who can barely read at ninth-grade level have been welcomed; C.U.N.Y. is determined to tutor them until they make it through a two-year community college or one of the city's topflight four-year institutions. Deluged with 35,000 freshmen, C.U.N.Y. is holding classes in rented store fronts and trailers; faculty members are taking turns at shared desks, and students are shunning jammed libraries to study in telephone booths.

Expansion and Exclusion. C.U.N.Y.'s switch from elitism to egalitarianism represents the academic world's most radical response so far to explosive changes in the nation's cities. In New York as elsewhere, rural blacks have flocked to the city; middle-class whites have increasingly moved to the suburbs. As a result, C.U.N.Y. and other urban universities confront rising pressure from poor youths, often members of minority groups, who yearn for the college degrees that they look upon as a ticket to U.S. affluence and status. "College is all kids talk about in high school these days," says Chris Vega, 18, a freshman at C.U.N.Y. "If you don't go to college, you just get any old job."

That desire for college is far from being fulfilled. Though U.S. campuses have almost tripled their enrollment since 1950, the headlong expansion has excluded vast numbers of college-age blacks, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos and poor whites. Blacks still make up only 6.4% of U.S. undergraduates, and almost half of them attend all-black colleges. Money is obviously an obstacle: census studies show that a family with an income below $3,000 is five times less likely to include a child attending college than a family that earns $15,000 or more. But equally important is the appalling performance of many urban public schools, which have failed to prepare slum kids for college--or anything else that counts in U.S. society.

In the light of its unusual history, C.U.N.Y. could have been expected to cope with this phenomenon better than almost any urban university in the country. The original City College of New York--then known as the Free Academy--was founded in 1847 to let "the children of the rich and the poor take their seats together and know of no distinction save that of industry, good conduct and intellect." "City" fulfilled its charter by schooling waves of immigrant youths, especially Jews, who were barred by many private colleges of the time. From the 1920s on, the "proletarian Harvard" produced more students who went on to doctorates than any other U.S. college, to say nothing of alumni as diverse as Zero Mostel, Bernard Malamud and Jonas Salk plus the current managing editor of the New York Times and the chief judge of New York State's highest court.

Then came the crunch of meritocracy: besieged by more and more applicants, City kept raising the cutoff point for admission--from a high school grade average of 72% in 1920 to 85% in 1960. But now the city's newly arrived minorities were black, poor, lacking academic tradition and doing so disastrously in high school that college seemed impossible. Eight years ago, only 2% of C.U.N.Y. freshmen were nonwhite.

Meaningless Diplomas. Often this pattern has little to do with abilities or ambitions. Convinced that most slum kids are doomed to failure, some New York teachers tend to guarantee it. Instead of being encouraged to take academic courses aimed at college, such students are commonly shunted into low-level programs that lead to vocational and "general" diplomas. Standards can be scandalous: one girl got a B in English for pasting together a scrapbook of pictures to illustrate the meanings of words. The kids--and their potential employers--know that a general diploma is virtually meaningless. Substantial numbers of New York's black high school students drop out before graduating; students from poor families wind up nearly three years behind the average in reading. Educational failure contributes to other problems: roughly 8% of New York's wage earners have incomes at or near poverty levels, and one in eight New Yorkers is on welfare.

The have-nots are often painfully aware of statistics showing that a college degree is worth roughly $4,000 a year more in earning power than a high school diploma. To compound their anger, the city's changing population patterns have surrounded some of C.U.N.Y.'s 18 campuses with increasingly resentful black neighborhoods. A year and a half ago, black students made the City College campus the focal point of their rage. They demanded that more blacks be admitted to the predominantly white enclave on a hilltop above Harlem. Weeks of turmoil, which included the burning of an auditorium, pressured President Buell Gallagher into resigning.

Political Agility. In the middle of the mess was C.U.N.Y. Chancellor Albert Bowker. With his mumbling speech and rumpled suits, the 51-year-old scholar may not have suggested the image of an urban savior. But Bowker came to the problem with impressive credentials. Born in Winchendon, Mass., he was a respected mathematical statistician with an undergraduate degree from M.I.T. and a Ph.D. from Columbia. As dean of the Stanford graduate school for five years, he had pushed his faculty to the top in national ratings and drawn the attention of New York City's board of higher education, which hired him in 1963 primarily to create a first-rate graduate school at C.U.N.Y.

Long before the City College outburst, Bowker proved his agility in New York's political jungle. During one power struggle with the board, he coolly resigned, taking two C.U.N.Y. college presidents with him until the trustees capitulated. The graduate studies improved apace: C.U.N.Y. now enrolls 28,500 graduate students. Partially because of pressure from two teachers' unions, salaries rose to $11,960 for instructors and to $29,800 for full professors. A few prestigious scholars, like Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., pull down $50,000, compared with Bowker's $45,000.

Expanding Brainpower. Carefully consulting with community groups to determine local needs, Bowker pushed C.U.N.Y. into offering a host of services for the city, including research in welfare problems and the oceanographic vessel Atlantic Twin, which studies pollution in New York harbor. C.U.N.Y. now trains teachers' aides and paraprofessional nurses. It retrains retired cops and firemen to fill critical shortages in nursing, teaches city planning to neighborhood leaders and runs eleven centers for teaching thousands of jobless adults such skills as how to repair air conditioners and mold plastics.

As he has worked to expand New York's brainpower, which is C.U.N.Y.'s most important function, Bowker has presided over incredible growth; since he took office, his university has added three four-year campuses and three community colleges to its units scattered throughout the city (see map). Two more will open next fall. They range from Georgian-style Brooklyn College and Park Avenue's Hunter College to raw two-year schools in poverty areas and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice for New York policemen. C.U.N.Y.'s 195,000 students make it the third largest institution of higher education in the country, after the State University of New York and the California state college system.

Back-Row Obscenities. Sheer expansion, though, was hardly sufficient to meet the minority group pressure. In essence, C.U.N.Y.'s dilemma was whether it should go on picking only proven academic winners--or let in everyone who might benefit from a college education. In fact, Bowker already had a prototype solution: a five-year-old program for giving low-income high school graduates a chance at C.U.N.Y. The "College Discovery" project recruited, counseled, tutored and paid disadvantaged kids as much as $50 a week while they attended C.U.N.Y.'s community colleges. SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) did the same for four-year campuses. Both projects taught the teachers as much as the learners learned.

"I took one kid out for ice cream," recalls one professor, "and when he ate it he clutched the side of his mouth in pain--his teeth were full of cavities." Violent headaches were common, until teachers realized that many students were too poor to buy needed eyeglasses. Even with glasses, they took a dim view of standard English courses rich in Henry James and Christina Rossetti, whose polished phrases merely provoked bored back-row obscenities.

The SEEK dropout rate was discouraging: roughly 60% during the first three years. Still, that was only 10% worse than the national rate for collegians with more conventional preparation. And gradually teachers found that they could stimulate deep intellectual curiosity with books and materials that illuminated the black experience. SEEK and College Discovery staffers are now convinced that their efforts have dramatically changed the several thousand students who have already entered the programs. When SEEK produced its first four college graduates last winter, two were cum laude and all were headed for graduate school, including a remarkable hustler turned scholar, Arnold Kemp (see box opposite). By the time of the campus eruptions last year, the question for Bowker was whether the university could expand SEEK still further.

Marathon negotiations between City College faculty and minority students produced a preliminary plan that would have admitted half of City's freshman class "without regard to grades." Politicians denounced the scheme as a "quota" that would elbow out normally qualified students. Blacks were skeptical because the quota had a specified limit--like those implicit in methods for admitting minority students at other U.S. colleges and universities. Bowker was secretly pleased when the tenured faculty and the board of higher education turned the plan down.

As an alternative, some faculty members favored the "open access" strategy pioneered by University of California President Clark Kerr ten years ago. California now has a three-tiered system of public campuses: state universities are limited to the top eighth of high school graduates; state colleges accept the top third, and community colleges are open to all. The U.S. already has more than 1,000 two-year colleges and is adding more at the rate of one per week. In his higher-education message to Congress last March, President Nixon endorsed this expansion strategy wholeheartedly. "A traditional four-year college program is not suited to everyone," he said.

Do It Now. Bowker found himself in a squeeze. For one thing, community colleges have the image of ranking at the bottom of the academic pecking order and thus tend to set low expectations for both students and teachers. As Bowker saw it, admitting disadvantaged students only to community colleges might have created de facto segregation, further inflamed black grievances against C.U.N.Y. and led to the very disorder that he was determined to avoid. Opening up all campuses seemed the only solution, and Bowker became convinced that if such a program was to work at all, the university would have to gamble on installing it voluntarily before social and political explosions installed it by force. "This had to be done now," says Bowker. "So we did it."

As a remarkable result, C.U.N.Y.'s new freshman class includes 9,000 students who would have been flatly rejected under previous admission standards. One-third of the class is nonwhite, the biggest group of black and Puerto Rican freshmen in the U.S. The 9,000 include former laborers and domestics, cab drivers, carpenters and the sons and daughters of blue-collar workers. Many are the first in their families to enter college. They are awed--but all business. "These are the original American revolutionaries," says C.U.N.Y. Vice Chancellor Timothy Healy. "They want a piece of the action."

Automatic Degrees? Will they get it? At least half the freshmen need some remedial teaching before they can deal with college-level work. But no one yet knows whether the techniques that worked for SEEK students can be applied successfully on a mass scale. Many critics, including Spiro Agnew and some faculty members, fear that C.U.N.Y. risks turning itself into a college-level version of the failure-breeding high schools. Other skeptics contend that students who receive automatic college places may become embittered when they encounter persistent academic difficulties. If they then demand automatic degrees, they could devalue the credentials they yearn for.

By contrast, Bowker insists that changed admission standards will not change degree standards--at least so far as he can help it. To avoid easy promotion, flunking students will be allowed to try and try again as long as teachers feel that they are making progress. Some may take ten years to earn a degree; but they will be no novelty among C.U.N.Y.'s many part-time students. Bowker also plans a special incentive: some bright students may soon be allowed to plan their own curriculums around a subject that fascinates them, and earn a new kind of diploma, a "university degree." As for the problem of teaching C.U.N.Y.'s huge classes, Bowker is undaunted: the swarms of students arrived just as the U.S. produced a nationwide surplus of teachers in many fields. When the university set out to hire 1,000 more teachers last spring, a single ad in the New York Times drew 4,000 responses, many of them from young Ph.D.s avid to help C.U.N.Y. effect social change and get well paid for doing it.

Ultimately, Bowker hopes to attack poor education at its roots: the public schools. He thinks that the open-admissions policy is already encouraging more slum kids to try for college and refuse to settle for general diplomas. Even under C.U.N.Y.'s new policy, those entering four-year colleges must either have earned an 80% average or rank in the top half of their school classes. Bowker is also mindful that C.U.N.Y. supplies 60% of the city's schoolteachers and reasons that his new minority students will eventually raise the schools' low ratio (11%) of minority teachers. Moreover, he wants C.U.N.Y. to take over several city high schools and try new teaching methods. One idea: a flexible middle school that would span the last two years of high school and the first two of college.

To safeguard research and scholarship while C.U.N.Y. is undergoing so strenuous a change, Bowker is working hard to recruit the outstanding students that draw outstanding professors. He seems to be succeeding; after all, C.U.N.Y. still charges no tuition in a day when college costs are soaring. And Bowker is particularly skilled at getting the necessary money. C.U.N.Y.'s budget (split between the state and city) is $327 million this year, and may hit $1 billion by 1975. Yet Bowker is confident that he can obtain these staggering sums during a period of severe financial pinches for most institutions because open admissions has generated a new base of political support for higher education.

Big Results, Big Mistakes. Thanks to C.U.N.Y.'s previous expansions, one-third of New York families include someone who either went to C.U.N.Y. or has a blood relative who did. Some alumni feel that open admissions is watering down the quality of their alma mater, but most are sympathetic. The city's unions have long demanded open college doors: their members have discovered that their children's high school diplomas are often passports to nowhere. Although blacks did most of the pushing, roughly 50% of C.U.N.Y.'s "high risk" freshmen are whites who had no chance before. In addition, many Catholics favor expanded admissions on grounds of pragmatism as well as social justice: Catholic campuses are running out of space for parochial school graduates. As a final boon for Bowker, the state's frugal rural and suburban legislators are impressed by his cost-effectiveness figures. Says one official: "It costs $2,000 a year to keep a ghetto kid in C.U.N.Y., compared with $12,000 to keep the same kid in jail."

Such arguments may be shaky. If the new high-risk students are really poor, they will need more than free tuition to stay in school. Unlike SEEK students, they get no stipends. C.U.N.Y. is providing some grants, but many must help their families by living at home and drawing welfare, or leave home and work. Study is tough under such conditions. Conversely, no one knows how many of the new freshmen are not truly poor but merely middle-class students with modest school records who would otherwise have paid to attend private institutions. Finally, critics contend that C.U.N.Y.'s new students are being "overeducated" for nonexistent jobs, and would do better at technical training institutes. Nonsense, says Bowker. The city's economy is rapidly shifting away from manufacturing jobs and he insists that it will need all the service workers and paraprofessionals that C.U.N.Y. can produce.

Whatever the outcome, Vice Chancellor Healy describes the drama well: "We're going to get more and bigger results and make more and bigger mistakes--because we're moving faster and farther than anyone else." Clearly, open admissions is a daring attempt to bridge the gap between the American dream of useful education for all and the widespread failure of high schools that were supposed to provide it. The experiment could challenge and invigorate colleges all over the U.S. It might also provide a case study in academic disaster. For the moment, the nation can only admire the fact that open admissions is being tried at all.

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