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A recent article in The Atlantic asks a provocative but unsettling question: “Has College Gotten Too Easy?” Drawing on yet unpublished research by Jeff Denning, a Brigham Young economist, the article argues that recent modest increases in college graduation rates can’t be explained by college initiatives to promote student success or by high schools producing better-prepared graduates.
Given that time spent studying is down and time spent working for pay is up, the most compelling explanations appear to lie in grade inflation and less demanding course work.
One response at many colleges and universities is to increasingly “gate” entry into their most popular or prestigious programs.
Take the example of Kennesaw State University in Georgia. For freshman admissions, the institution requires a minimum 2.5 high school GPA, an SAT reading test score of 25 and a math score of 490 or ACT English and math scores of 18. But entry into the Coles College of Business requires a 3.0 GPA in calculus, financial and managerial accounting, micro- and macroeconomics, business statistics, information systems, and the legal and ethical environment of business.
The institution has imposed similarly rigorous gates for admission into the bachelor of science in nursing program and the College of Computing and Software Engineering and the Southern Polytechnic College of Engineering and Engineering Technology.
Kennesaw State is not alone. A few years ago, the University of Texas at Austin sharply reduced the number of undergraduates admitted to its business program, which helps account for its No. 1 ranking in accounting, No. 4 ranking in marketing, No. 5 in management information systems and finance, and No. 6 in insurance and real estate. Of 8,034 applicants, just 1,835 were admitted. Total enrollment in the McCombs School of Business -- 4,752 out of a total UT Austin enrollment of 40,804 undergraduates.
Restricted majors are no longer limited to studio art or music performance.
Virginia Tech has a lengthy webpage listing its restricted majors, which include architecture, industrial design, interior design and landscape architecture.
No longer do faculty openly embrace the idea that their job is to separate the wheat from the chaff. But today a growing number of departments is enforcing restrictions on entry into high-demand programs, imposing admissions and GPA requirements and weed-out requirements, nominally to improve program quality, but for other less savory reasons as well.
In some instances, these admission gates reflect genuine capacity constraints. But these restrictions also result from a desire to raise a program’s reputation, ranking and performance on certification exams.
This quest to elevate program quality is not without victims: these are the students who could succeed within a particular major but who have lost out due to departmentally imposed admission restrictions. These are students who met all admissions requirements but are closed out nonetheless.
I would argue that this development has become a serious barrier to graduation. It harms student morale, shatters students’ dreams and makes academic life much more competitive. Transfer students are particularly likely to lose out.
A special problem occurs when students are required to exit a program when they receive a low grade in a single course. Some must essentially start over as they shift to a new major.
One approach might be to create career-aligned options. A student who might not qualify for medical, dental, pharmacy or veterinary school admissions might be well suited for another field in allied heath fields -- but not if requirements are so radically different that the student must start from scratch.
Another approach is to institute a variety of degree tracks. At UT Austin, just 3 percent of undergraduate majors will practice psychology. But many might make use of their training in an HR department, a career services office or another field that would benefit from expertise in psychology. The key is to explicitly expose majors to such career tracks and to provide the preparation they need.
In recent years, gated communities -- those “walled gardens” where the affluent residents seclude themselves from outside threats -- have received vociferous criticism as a new form of segregation and as symbols of exclusion and privilege and as purveyors of an us-versus-them mentality.
I fear that colleges and universities are creating their own gated communities, depriving talented students of the opportunity to pursue their dreams.
Drawing a line between legitimate and less legitimate barriers to entry is not easy. Most universities now have honors colleges or honors programs to offer a liberal arts college experience to an exceptional subset of students. But in these cases, the honors students also interact with other students in their major.
Other gated programs, in contrast, seem to exist less for the students’ benefit than for the program’s reputation.
What a terrible and unsettling irony: too often, students from underresourced high schools or community colleges successfully enter a flagship campus only to discover that they won’t have the opportunity to major in their chosen field.
Steven Mintz is special adviser to the president of Hunter College for student success and strategic initiatives.
