Some colleagues were reminiscing last night and noted that the old " look to you right look to your left one of you won’t be here by the end of the year" speeches that used to be commonly give at some colleges are long dead. Those warnings were a point of pride by universities. Which is kind of appalling. Today of course universities brag about retention rates. How times have changed.
Yes, times have changed. It reminds me of the thread (I don’t remember what forum I saw it on) about valedictorians.
In the past the valedictorian was the graduate with the highest GPA. Now you can have 222 valedictorians!
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/06/03/best-of-class-in-dublin-222-grads-tie.html
The “point of pride” in that saying in past decades was the implication that the school did not water down its courses and curricula to accommodate weak students who may have gotten in due to much lower admission standards back then. Yes, students whose high school records only barely indicate college-readiness found it easy to get into many colleges back then, but they really needed to turn around their motivation and study habits to succeed in college. Of course, back then, the cost of starting college and not finishing was also much lower than it is today.
BTW, this is still true at the top Canadian unis (also the engineering schools and other STEM majors at some American unis, though in those cases, students tend to just switch out of STEM instead of dropping out). In both cases, the admissions hurdle may not be all that high but the students are held to a high standard.
^This. I don’t understand why some people have a problem with sink-or-swim environments. In our rankings-obsessed culture, smaller/lesser known schools simply can’t attract as many top students as elite universities. There is only so much these colleges can do, in their control, to provide high quality academics, and that means students either sink-or-swim. “We’ll let you in, but you are expected to keep up”. Furthermore, these less selective schools generally provide a range of tutoring/support services to help struggling (but motivated) students stay on top. And the ones that get weeded out? Too bad so sad… they had their chance.
It may be more of a concern now because the cost of college is higher, so starting and not completing is more costly (and also job prospects after non completion now are worse than decades ago).
Of course, increased admission competition now means that more weeding is now done in the admission office, rather than in the actual college classroom.
I agree, but diluting the academics to accommodate less-prepared students is far more concerning than giving them a second chance to prove themselves. I understand the bad investment point of view, but that could be fixed by shifting more of the costs to the student/family (reducing the risk to taxpayers). Lower income weaker students could attend community college to improve their performance, then transfer, with aid, to a 4-year school if they show improvement.
Above all else, I think colleges need to maintain quality… whether that means a) making it harder for students to get in, or b) making it harder for students to get out.
Actually heard the “look to your right, look to your left” speech at S’s freshman orientation last summer. It was something like “Look around. Only about half of you will be graduating 4 years from now. So think about what you need to do to make sure you are in that half.”
So too do the more selective schools.
This was a common meme in Engineering weed out courses such as General Physics. That said, of the 71 students who started my Algebra-based physics course in January, only 39 actually finished AND passed, and of those a number of them did so with D’s and will likely fall from the MET major along the way.
On the topic of engineering weed out courses, there’s a set of department courses that many people have to retake. First day of one of the classes the professor tells everyone how half the class withdraws or get a D or lower. Chuckles were heard through the lecture room. But come time after the second test, less than half of the students had stayed in the class and a good third of those sitting in the lecture hall were teetering between passing and failing. Not nearly as many chuckling come final grades were handed out.
This was the standard orientation speech at the small engineering school I attended. We all heard it: Look to your left - look to your right - one of you will not be here at the end of the program." They were right, too. It was really, really tough. We had to work incredibly hard, and that curve was a killer. But those of us who made it through back in the day sure do feel like we accomplished something.
I know for a fact that the school no longer says this. Who in their right mind is going to pay $40,000 a year to flunk out?!
When I began law school, decades ago, the intro speech by the dean began: look to the left of you, now look to the right … odds are all of you will be here next year.
^Lol. The intro speech I remember from law school: “Most of you graduated in the top 10% of your college class, half of you will be in the bottom 50% of this class.”
Ours was everyone who was a val stand up. Everyone who was a sal stand up. The rest of you stand up. Everyone standing will have to work very hard to get to graduation.