Maybe not @GMTplus7 but it wasn’t left out. Again, I agree with the Post commenter - what would the school do to a student who made such a statement? i need to re-read the article but I didn"t see this guy apologize.
Not so sure considering the survey the President and his admins are using to expel the “at risk” students was conducted under false pretenses and the “at-risk” students were assessed as such by the survey and mandated professorial assessments based on less than a month’s worth of work.
What the president did was much more akin to the Peanuts comic where the President and admins are acting in the role of Lucy intending to pull her football trick and the “at-risk” students unwittingly being placed in the role of the hapless Charlie Brown.
While amusing as a comic…it’s outrageous when this is perpetuated by the president of a higher-ed institution on students who were tricked when they were told there was no wrong answers on the survey. In short, he and his admins baited-and-switched those “at-risk” students.
But how would the college benefit from gaining a reputation as an “aggressive weed-out” school, or one where surveys from the administration should automatically be treated with more suspicion than students typically have for college administrations?
Post #76 I don’t think we are mistaken. I bet if I go find the mission statement of this school, that is exactly his job. Although he seems to think he is serving 25 of them best by getting rid of them.
There is an argument that can be made that if the student will flunk out, it is better for the student to be dismissed earlier with less cost and debt than later with more cost and debt.
The problem with this argument is that:
a. It cannot be known in advance whether a struggling student will eventually flunk out, or will turn around and graduate. If a college has an aggressive dismissal or weed-out policy, then it could dismiss many students who would otherwise have turned around and graduated under a more typical academic probation policy.
b. It is even more speculative to guess that a student will eventually flunk out only four weeks into the first semester.
c. If answers to a survey at orientation are used and considered reliable indicators of eventual flunk out (a questionable proposition), then it would be better to put the questions in the application for admission and avoid admitting “flunk out profile” students in the first place.
Not only that, but there are some marginal students who will succeed if they are given help. To identify marginal students, and then kick them to the curb instead of offering help, is callous in the extreme and has nothing to do with the " just and compassionate engagement with the world" this religious institution claims to embrace.
Such limited assessment tools also means there’s a higher risk of false positives and thus…risks kicking out students who may not have been actually at risk if given a semester to prove themselves.
I just looked on college data.com, and it reports that the middle 50% on the ACT is 15 - 22 at this school. If you are admitting students who can’t get a 15 on the ACT, you are going to have to be patient with them and patiently help them develop knowledge and study skills. It is not going to happen over night.
You can’t really take a sink or swim approach with these students like it is the Ivy League, and every kid in the room is potentially the next Elon Musk.
http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg02_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=1059 says 20-24 is the middle 50% range of the ACT scores.
Or were you looking at the listing for the other Mount Saint Mary’s University at http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg02_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=1117 ?
The ironic part is most of the private respectable/elite Us…including the Ivies don’t take this degree of ruthless sink-or-swim approach once they’ve admitted their students but usually attempt ways to retain such students as much as possible.
In fact, some which are LAC-like go out of their way to reach out to undergrads if there’s even an inkling of trouble. In short…most private elite/Ivies are more likely to actually cuddle/coddle their bunnies than to “place a Glock to their heads” per the words of Mount St Mary’s of MD President…
@ucbalumnus I didn’t realize there were two of them. lol
Well, 20-24 is a little bit better, but it is still not exactly a group that you can really go all tough guy on and expect good results.
DD1 had a modestly advanced math class (Math 240 since I know @UCBalumnus will ask) at Penn where the first mid-term was very difficult and the professor told the students that they needed to work harder, or drop the class. In that case I thought it was reasonable for him to decide that he isn’t going to slow down the class because a portion of the class does not want to work hard. Additionally, he returned the test results several days before the final drop date so students did have that option. That seems reasonable in a class of highly accomplished students.
However, this Mount St. Mary’s situation is not dealing with students who are even close to that level of development, so it just is not reasonable to take a hardball approach. If the new President comes from Bain, maybe he is not familiar with developing students with more modest abilities. In that case, you need to begin by figuring out where the students are, and work from there.
This is a terrible reading of the situation by the president. Parents and students choose this school because it’ll be more nurturing and supportive than Towson or Salisbury. The school succeeds in attracting students because of this reasoning: It’s more expensive, but with the smaller classes and personal attention it’ll help the student succeed better than the sink-or-swim atmosphere at the larger public universities. THAT is their “brand”.
So, this comment is a disaster for the school.
Whoever chose someone from Bain for the school and thought you can handle people the way you handle financial products should get kicked out of a job, too, BTW.
(I once had to explain you don’t “produce” students the way you “produce” soup cans. Some people really don’t “get” the human factor and what it means. They should not be, in any capacity, in education.)
In any case, the added problems are that
1° the president wants to sound all nice and all by underscoring that tuition will be refunded. I doubt that was the original plan - why would the students be admitted if they’re going to be kicked out and returned tuition - why admit them in the first place? So, the university needed warm bodies and admitted marginal students who paid their enrollment deposits and housing deposits, then their first semester of tuition+R&B.
Note that, typically, after a month, you’re not eligible for a full tuition/R&B refund.
2° what are the students supposed to do? Now, they’ve been enrolled at a university. Some universities will consider them transfers, even thought they won’t have a transcript or anything. It’s too late for them to enroll elsewhere for the Fall. They’ll either have to enroll for the Spring, and miss the Fall programs for freshman (seminars and orientation) along with the socializing that comes from starting together and is crucial, we know, for maginal students’ retention (they tend to stay because they made friends and feel they’re well-supported, not because they find the classes fascinating). Or they have to wait the year out and reapply for the Fall. How is that fair to the 25 students in question? For all you know, that incident means they will not return to college at all, when they could have enrolled somewhere else, perhaps a community college near home.
If you don’t think students will make it at your institution, don’t admit them or provide support services. It’s not rocket science.
If your brand is “supportive and nurturing”, you don’t speak of “drowning” students or “kicking them out quickly”. Again, not rocket science.
I think we all agree that expelling students based on a survey is un-ethical and un-workable. Even using academic progress in the first 3 or 4 weeks of class is un-workable; simply not enough data to work with.
However, what if the school had a policy that allowed CLEARLY at risk students the chance to withdraw with a full refund, and take a gap semester/year?
Not academically at risk students, but students that are at risk for personal reasons? For example:
A student with a serious drug problem. Keep them in school, or send them home to their family for help (if the family is apply to support the student)?
A student with serious mental issues. Keep them in school or send them home to their family?
This sort of policy would raise a lot of issues (student privacy, who makes the determination about the students state of mental health, etc.), but assuming that could be worked out, is this an option the school should offer? Should a school be more proactive in removing students that have been identified early as being at risk (mental, physical)?
Working with students to help them decide if they need to withdraw early in the year makes sense to me. Unilaterally deciding students are not college material after admitting them 6 months earlier does not.
I returned to college last fall (as a 45 yo mom) and I was required to take a drug, alcohol and sex survey in order to register for the next semester. The questions were leading and incredibly personal and intrusive.
I was very careful how I answered. I try to function from a “don’t lie” moral compass; but I also operate from the standpoint that the school has no right to ask me these questions, and the survey itself was morally invalid.
This may be moral relativism, but asking about my personal sexual proclivities is outrageous and tramples on my right to privacy. This was actually the second time this happened to me; when I was taking night classes back in the early 90s at Miami Dade Community college, a graduate student came into our psych class and started handing out a survey that he said was being used for his research with our teacher’s permission.
The survey was all about our sexual habits. At that point I was already married and in my 20’s (more mature than the rest of the class), and while I’m not nearly the fierce dragon I am today about stuff like this, I was incredulous. The entire class started filling it out. I raised my hand and said “is this required for a grade in this class”? The teacher said “no”. I said “then I choose not to fill it out”. The graduate student stomped up to me, grabbed my paper off of my desk, wadded into a ball and shoved it in the trash.
The other kids in the class (mostly very young and Cuban American) looked at me like I was nuts. Then a few of them put down their pencils too.
I don’t trust surveys.
Someone mentioned engineering students flunking out in their first year. Students in a major that is too hard for them can switch majors, and not drop out in many cases.
Wonder if this guy would kick out full pay students who fall into the struggling group…
Mount St. Mary’s renovated their Field House over the summer. The new roof collapsed this weekend due to the snow (no injuries). Is the college president going to drown the structural engineer?
How has he not been fired yet?
^It seems because the president and board of trustees are walking in lockstep on this issue. The chair of the board wrote a letter to the student newspaper editor on behalf of the entire board shooting the messenger (the college newspaper). It’s quite a read… http://msmecho.com/2016/01/19/letter-to-the-editor-a-message-from-john-coyne-chair-on-behalf-of-the-board-of-trustees-of-mount-st-marys-university/