This year’s yield and next year’s application numbers are likely to make Newman “stop” if anything does. As a parent, I’d be reluctant to let my kid attend Mount St. Mary’s at this point, even if he/she were among the strongest applicants and unlikely to be drowned or shot before the end of the first semester. I couldn’t trust the president or board to put student welfare above the USNews rankings. At least other institutions know how to look as if they do. And if I want my child to attend a Catholic school because my faith is important to our family, I’d be livid at his comments regarding crucifixes, Catholicism not selling, etc.
Not a math whiz, but if 60 percent of 1600 students are polled and 76 percent of them support Newman, that doesn’t look like a landslide result to me. Why did students cheer this guy? You honestly have me there. Perhaps they’re swept up in the desire to see their school climb a few slots in the rankings.
In any group such as the student body, you will have people with different views. I’m not surprised there are some students in the president’s corner on this issue, but how large of a percentage of the student body is supporting the president? And… if this percentage is large, what does this say about the relationship between the student body and the faculty? After all, the faculty voted 87 - 3 to ask the president to resign. Doesn’t sound like a good recipe for student/faculty relations.
I’m sure the original purpose for these quality of life improvements, wasn’t to win votes.
This was started months ago, it’s a typical strategy when trying to improve retention rates (and hence, graduation rates) and student recruitment (especially yield rates). It’s something of a side effect that it’s made him personally popular with many of the students.
Personally, I think he’s popular with the kids, because he sounds like Doctor Who…who wouldn’t trust Doctor Who?!
Board members to “listen and learn”??? The board Chair is with Brinker Capital, the board Secretary is a venture capitalist, and the board Treasurer is CEO of an international outsourcing company. They’ve all been “drowning bunnies” for years. Not hard to see how MSMU got into this mess.
Well, if you look at a parent paying a full year of college, likely in the tens of thousands of dollars, vs. knowing in September that their child can’t even get to square one, why would anyone want the college to keep the child in “just to see”?
If the college knows in Sept. that the student won’t be successful, then they knew in May when they admitted them. They should never have taken the parents’ money.
However, I don’t agree that colleges know whether or not a student will be successful 3 weeks into the semester. This is just a maneuver to improve numbers at the expense of the students, and that has zero to do with a desire to educate them or save their families money. Accepting people you know you’re going to expel in a couple weeks (without due process) when you know that makes them ineligible for grants at a lot of schools and places a black mark on their academic record is not motivated by an interest in the welfare of the students or a desire to save the parents money. It’s self serving and irresponsible.
I have been wondering how he was actually going to ask these students to leave. I don’t think he would have been able to just expel them unilaterally. It sounds like it was going to be a situation where someone was going to talk to them and tell them they had been identified as at-risk and encouraged to leave by being offered their money back. I wonder what the plan was if the kid said no, I am here and I am staying?
I also wonder how many other schools are practicing this without being caught?
I agree; for every kid that crashes and burns, another one spreads their wings and soars-you just don’t know for sure until they get there how well they’ll do. This behavior on the part of the college was a greedy money grab, pure and simple. And evil.
Raise the admissions standards. Aggressively recruit. Don’t bait and switch.
Maybe they should look at how Northeastern managed to significantly raise its profile and admissions standards. I don’t think they did it by tricking 17 and 18 yr olds into confessing their weaknesses then booting them.
As for Ms. Patel, I take her point. But the fact that she is apparently willing to climb over the backs of the less fortunate doesn’t speak well for her ethics.
Northeastern is cheek by jowl to some of the biggest employers in New England. Northeastern has a huge physical footprint in a neighborhood which gentrified rapidly over the last 20 years due to the geography of Boston (can’t expand Eastward- that’s called the Atlantic Ocean). Northeastern had well regarded professional schools for decades, even when the undergraduate program was something of a weak link.
Clearly, Northeastern had certain advantages. Their co-op program is a major one, but that was in place decades ago, too. Nevertheless, they really changed their profile over a period when other schools in Boston did not, remaining comparatively static. What did they do?
I actually think that Newman is right in thinking that if MSM is to survive and thrive going forward that it needs to beef up its “vocational” offerings, which may involve loosening their core requirements to some degree. I don’t see MSM as an elite school for the liberal arts, and I don’t see it ever getting there. That’s not the way education is going, and there are plenty of better known schools filling that niche.
I just think that it could be done in a ethical way.
ETA: H and I were discussing this, and he remarked that if Newman left, it’s too bad Robert Bork is no longer available. >:)
Brandeis bulked up their finance program; Olin created something out of nothing; Bentley went from being a place where C students went when nobody else would accept them to an actual college with a business program; Babson put itself on the map especially with entrepreneurship programs; etc.
I would dispute that Northeastern is the only college which took advantage of being near Boston. And you can hardly blame MIT, Harvard or Wellesley for not having gone up in the rankings over the last decade since they had no place to go.
Maybe you’re right, but I haven’t had the impression that Brandeis, already a respected school, changed in that regard, and I think the same is true of Tufts and BU. Not to mention Suffolk, Emerson, UMass Boston, Wheaton, and various other places. Has Babson really changed that much? Maybe Bentley has. Olin, of course, is entirely new.
The whole situation in the Boston area is complicated by the existence of the former Jr colleges, too…
I didn’t say that Northeastern was the ONLY college to change its standing, I just think it is the most prominent example. Anyway, it sounds like MSM is probably more like Stonehill or Loyola MD or the like.
My point is that while I fully understand that MSM doesn’t want to go the way of Sweet Briar or any of the other small schools that are on the brink of collapse, we are told, there are apparently ways to do it that don’t involve unethical and crass behavior.
Boston University has cut the size of its freshman class from 4100 to 3500 in the past six years. This has raised the stats for enrolled students a bit, lowered the acceptance rate and raised the freshman retention rate. BU has also finally decided to cooperate with USNews and submit their data after decades or deriding rankings as useless. Their website now touts their improved rankings.
No they didn’t. However, some of the things NEU did to improve their rankings upset some friends and acquaintances who attended NEU during the '80s and early-mid '90s such as:
Reduce and eliminate AFY(Alternative Freshman Year) which provided for a provisional admission for students who technically didn’t qualify for admission or came from academically weaker HS. Provisions of the program included seriously reduced class sizes, remedial courses including basic sentence construction and multiplying/dividing fractions and decimals…material which is usually covered in late elementary school, weekly meetings with special academic counselors earmarked for this program, etc.
Raising admissions standards and reducing FA so lower-middle class and lower income students who were once NEU’s main constituents are now rejected. Some admitted after the change are also upset as they now have a much higher average debtload after graduation compared with the older group who graduated before the late '90s.
Accepting more well-off students with weaker academic records in the spring semester so they could get their tuition dollars and not have to count their stats in major ranking publications.
@cobrat Northeastern grew at a time when there were no community colleges and no UMass Boston. It provided a relatively low cost education for students who did not qualify for elite schools and didn’t want to attend ZooMass Amherst. In 1990 enrolment was falling due to competition. Northeastern did not abandon its former pool of students, they abandoned Northeastern! By the 1990’s community colleges were widespread and UMass Boston had grown into a real multi-school university. If a student needs remedial work he can go to a cc and transfer. If he wants a no frills education he can go to UMass Boston.
And if you have visited the campus in the past decade you would see the top notch facilities that were not there when tuition was relatively low. You get what you pay (or borrow) for.
