And why does our intrepid president want to drown the bunnies?
It would also help improve freshman retention, since attrition in the first few weeks doesn’t count against your numbers.
So, should schools look at having “at-risk” students leave early, saving those students from the expense and loans (St. Mary’s plan was to issue a full refund to these students)? Or should the school focus on retaining (cuddling) these students, and allowing them to take on the cost and stress? Should the focus be on admissions and would that be enough?
Heard about this a couple of days ago. Seems pretty clear this isn’t about making things better for those students, but instead about making the college retention #s look better. I think if a college admits a student, they owe that student support and the due process of their formal probationary process before the student is forced to leave. Some students who struggle at first get traction as they figure out how to navigate college. I do think this guy will lose his job over this – it is a PR disaster.
Easy way for the industry to fix this is to change the retention metric to count those students. It is likely he is not the only school president who is operating this way just the first to be outed. Yes, it is better to prevent the debt but by the time the student withdraws they have missed the deadlines in another school so they have lost a semester.
I’d be very curious to see the survey. I wonder what metric they used to measure the probability of success or failure, and whether low income kids and students of color are disproportionately affected.
I have to add, John Coyne, Chairman of the Board of Trustees sounds like a real piece of work.
Are the students told in the email that if they complete the survey it’s going to be used to weed them out of the college? If not, it hardly seems fair to use it against them.
As the parent of a student with dyslexia, dyscalculia, and dysgraphia, these types of policy concern me. I think the students most likely to struggle in the first weeks of college are those with disabilities and I wonder if this is a way for them to deal with those types of students. They can claim, honestly, that they admit them, but it doesn’t mean they’re actually committed to teaching them.
On the whole, it seems highly unethical and their motives are highly suspect. Nothing about this helps the children.
Sometimes folks outside of the industry (in this case education) can see and offer solutions that are blind to those so close to the process. On the other hand, many times those outside of the process, lack the institutional knowledge and background to avoid land mines others have already uncovered.
In this case, the way he described the problem works great as a consultant/partner at Bain, but blows up in your face as a college president.
I can’t imagine anyone, in business or otherwise, who would refer to his customers as something that needs to be put out of its misery. Nor do I believe any student should be dismissed before the probationary process defined in the catalog or handbook has been met.
And while I don’t think this guy’s motives are at all about what is best for the student, I have seen “what is best for the student” discussed among those who work with the high risk. I think it is legitimate to ask at what point continuing to take students’ money and sinking them into debt become unethical. The question, though, is much more about setting probation policy and how rigidly one sticks to it than it is about sacrificing students for the good of the institution’s retention rate.
My question is why they couldn’t weed out those students before they were admitted? Why even bring them onto the campus. Isn’t this what adcoms supposed to do?
C’mon… do you REALLY think this guy was thinking about the students and their debt? I don’t buy it for a second. No surprise to hear he worked for Bain, too.
Oldfort- there are kids who “on paper” look like solid college prospects. Nothing on the application tells you that the only reason the kid got to HS every morning was because Mom dragged him out of bed, Dad made him breakfast, and then one of them drove him to school because he missed the bus. There’s no place that shows that Mom made a big spreadsheet to track when his assignments were due and that Dad got him a summer internship at his office when the kid couldn’t manage to apply for a job at Target or Old Navy like his friends.
I see so many kids crash and burn when the parental support ladder falls apart. Kid has never made a dentist appointment. Kid has never walked home from the public library where he went to research a paper for school. Kid has never shopped for produce or bought a stamp or done a load of laundry.
How is an Adcom supposed to know that they are looking at the application of a kid who has been coaxed and prodded and cajoled and enabled through adolescence?
I also do not buy this thing about the only reason some of those high performers were doing well in high school were all due to their parents. If organizational skills were the only thing missing, and they had good academic foundations, those things could be taught fairly quickly.
There were 8+ hours mom and dad couldn’t be with them. Those kids would still need to take the exams by themselves and participate in class.
D1 tutored a very bright and unmotivated kid when she was in college. The best she could do was to help this kid bring up her grades to B to B-, and it was only because she did well on her final exams with D1’s help. This kid still missed a lot of homework that she never told mom about and she slept through most of her classes. I am sure those behaviors were reflected in her LORs, or should be.
I could see using such a survey as a tool to help admissions identify markers associated with success and failure at the college. For instance, if you gave freshman a survey then found that a notably high number of kids whose moms woke them up every day in high school had dropped out of college a year later it might make sense to add a “Tell me about your morning routine” question to the interview so that you could weed out borderline students who seemed to rely on parental help for their high school success.
What’s being alleged in the story is different, however. According to the allegations the college president wanted to identify already admitted at-risk students early enough in the year that he could fast-track failure and protect the institution’s stats. This didn’t seem to be about protecting students at all as the timeline was too brief for them to be able to sink or swim on their own, nor take advantage of university support resources to right a listing ship.