Crossroads at CUNY

For more than a century, New York's City College has enjoyed the reputation of a top-level school, a proletarian Harvard with such distinguished graduates as Felix Frankfurter, Jonas Salk, Bernard Malamud, Ira Gershwin and Alfred Kazin. In recent years, however, City College and the 19 other institutions that make up the tuition-free City University of New York (CUNY) have found it increasingly difficult to keep up their standards. Reason: a 1969 ruling that opened the doors of the university to any student holding a high-school diploma from New York City's school system, which graduates many functional illiterates. Result: CUNY was swamped with students who were ill-prepared even by the most generous standards to do college-level work. Last week the New York board of higher education voted 7-2 to require CUNY applicants to pass entrance examinations. Thus the experiment designed to give deprived minorities an opportunity to attend college reached an abrupt end.

Remedial Programs. Technically, the board's action was taken for economic rather than academic reasons. The budget jumped from $325 million in 1969 to $585 million last spring. In addition to the expense of absorbing more students (freshman enrollment increased from 29,937 in 1969 to a current high of 40,000), the number of full-time faculty members more than doubled, to 12,814 and remedial-reading and math programs set up to bring the new students up to college levels cost another $30 million annually.

CUNY's new entrance requirement --an eighth-grade level in both reading and math--will still seem shockingly low to most Americans. Yet over the next four years, it will disqualify an estimated 10,000 students a year saving New York about $16 million annually.

Reaction to the ending of open admissions was furious. Students staged protests and announced plans to file suit against the board of higher education. A CUNY sociologist released a report showing that most of those barred under the new standards would be minority students. Author Kazin, a professor at CUNY'S Hunter College, suggested that more than money was involved in the move to end open admissions. "There is an illiberal strain in the country," he said. "It is a revolt against the masses in New York, against the idea that so many people are allowed to go to college at once."

But another CUNY graduate, Harvard Sociologist Nathan Glazer, seemed to put the ruling into better perspective: "It seems a highly reasonable notion that a college freshman be able to read and write at the eighth-grade level."

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