UVa to background check all students

College Search & Lists
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<p>[U&lt;/a&gt;. of Virginia Plans Background Checks of All Students - The Ticker - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/blogPost/U-of-Virginia-Plans/23783/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en]U”>http://chronicle.com/blogPost/U-of-Virginia-Plans/23783/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en)</p>

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<p>Perhaps all schools should be doing this. :-(</p>

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<p>Any word on which offenses will be grounds for a revocation of admission?</p>

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<p>UVA has almost 21,000 total enrollment, and they get another 21,000 applications per year. Take out the graduates for a given year and they may have, say, 36,000 background checks to do each year.</p>

<p>If someone can run 10 checks per hour, that would take 3,600 staff hours to generate. That’s 90 weeks of full-time labor.</p>

<p>Assume that you have to do this twice a year, since there’s turnover each semester (so because people get arrested during the course of a semester, actually it takes 180 weeks of labor per year). But you really need that information in the month before the semester begins - any later and the point is moot; any earlier and the data is outdated. So there are 90 weeks worth of labor to be performed each semester in a four-week window. This will take a temporary, full-time staff of 23 people, twice a year, doing nothing but running background checks eight hours a day for a month.</p>

<p>Now the administration has all that data and they have to go through those that show any records. Speeding tickets will show up; so will tickets for open beer cans in public. The number of truly critical cases will be like needles to be found in an enormous haystack. The full-time staff hours to be invested may be as many as the dozens of weeks worth of temporary labor required to run all the reports.</p>

<p>I see no way that UVA - or any other university of any significant size - could pull this off.</p>