The president will likely get a very large severance package though.
^Sad but true. 
That’s something alumni can rally around, right? “No big severance package to the guy who sunk our beloved alma mater”.
There could be a nice federal law suit if they used the disability info to throw students out.
There’s also been a backlash in academic circles.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/02/10/academics-and-academic-groups-respond-fury-over-firing-2-professors-mount-st-marys
One of the responses…
The questions linked to disability and finances on the survey, which required the student ID number, sink the “identify students who won’t be academically successful and help them” defense.
Sounds like, rather, the president was more interested in cutting mental health services and disability support?
I think he’ll say that he was using those questions to identify those who needed help.
… except the expressed purpose was to cut 25 freshmen. So, cut the disabled?
I am not telling you what he was doing, just what he will say. His original stated purpose was to identify students who needed help which is why the faculty and staff went along with it. Later he stated that a secondary purpose was to cull 20-25 freshmen and that is when objections started.
Yes, cut the disabled if they are at risk of not returning for their sophomore year. Same for those with financial challenges.
This was an effort to improve the freshman retention rates.
A similar survey (with far better privacy measures) who’s goal was to identify at risk students for additional support, would not have been an issue for the faculty. But when your goal is to “drown the bunnies…”.
Edit: posted my message after gettingschooled responded…
From @Gator88NE 's original post-
“The president, Simon Newman, acknowledged to The Washington Post that he was pushing a plan to intervene early on with students who may be having difficulties. But he said that this was to help them, although he said that the help in some cases might be for them to see that they might be better off a less expensive public institution.”
While my D did not apply to Mt. St. Mary’s, it was on our radar as it’s only about an hour from home and has the major she wanted. Since we aren’t Catholic, it didn’t make the list for her, but she does have a friend there (a freshman; not sure how much she has communicated with her about scandal).
Anyhow, we first heard of Mt. St. Mary’s at a college fair for students with learning disabilities, where the schools highlighted how they help kids with learning differences. So it’s pretty sad that LDs seem to be one of the screening points in the infamous survey.
Ugh. That survey seems legit in the context of offering additional help but is really, truly awful in the context of identifying kids to “encourage” to leave.
After seeing this thread I went to the MSMU website to check out the school. First, there are two Mount Saint Mary’s Universities, one in MD, another in CA.
But since then I am getting sidebar and banner ads for both colleges. Not only here on CC but also on a variety of other websites!
@Gator88NE ntoed:
Very true—and a partial demonstration of why the drive to measure colleges by completion rates is problematic.
My institution is, by several measures, in the lowest 10% for 6-year graduation rate in the country (excluding for-profits and community colleges). We have been urged to do everything we can to improve our graduation rates. However, as faculty, what can we do? We’re an open-access institution, so we get lots of woefully underprepared students—are we supposed to pass them through our classes without them actually earning passing grades? Find some way to prevent many of our best students from transferring after they’ve been here a year or two (since those count against our completion rate), perhaps by falsely claiming they’ve violated student conduct policies, and so having a hold put on their transcripts? Or maybe we should just applaud MSM’s president for finding a way to improve his institution’s retention and completion rates without having to resort to such methods.
It’s a useful metric, but a very, very bad one to judge institutions by—it creates a lot of perverse incentives.
Many students do not have the gray matter and/or drive to succeed in college. They should never be admitted. Open admissions is an invitation to institutional mediocrity. Good students who enroll in such schools get tired of dealing with those who cannot succeed or who don’t care about succeeding and transfer up.
Open admission colleges (usually community colleges) exist to give those who previously did poorly in high school another chance to prove themselves capable of doing college work. Of course, some of those students will still fail at college, but there is value in offering another chance to some who do succeed at college in their second chance (often after some years of additional maturity gained while doing something else after high school like working or military service). In addition, open admission community colleges can be last-resort low-cost safeties for high school seniors who got shut out (including financially shut out because all of their admissions were too expensive) in their college applications.
Obviously, it seems that Mount Saint Mary’s mission is something other than the above, at least under the current administration.
@ucbalumnus I was referring to the comment by @dfbdfb. I had the impression that he is on the faculty of a four year institution.
I am on the faculty of a four±year institution—but an expressly open-access* four±year institution.
- The distinction between open-access and open-admissions is important for some, but it's a blurry distinction and for the present discussion is effectively meaningless, no matter what it might be. My institution very carefully describes itself as the former, though.
@dfbdfb “We’re an open-access institution, so we get lots of woefully underprepared students—are we supposed to pass them through our classes without them actually earning passing grades?”
I am interested in understanding this. Clearly there is no point in passing students that do not know the material. I am wondering whether the issue is that more remediation is needed to strengthen the underlying reading, writing and math skills that students have. I suspect that the student feels like they are wasting time by doing that, but in reality by taking time to enhance those skills, that they would be more likely to cruise through the rest of the curriculum more easily.
Is that accurate or just naive? You see what really happens day-to-day, so it is interesting to hear your perspective.