30 september 97
Open Admissions Under Attack
Activists Gather to Protect Opportunity
by Dina Giangrande, Contributing Writer
For the past few weeks, members of the new “Open Admissions Committee” (OAC) have been meeting in preparation for a series of conferences which they hope will take place on many of CUNY’s 21 campuses. The first conference, scheduled for October 21 at City College, is part of their plan to celebrate and protect the open admissions policy.
Despite the fact that the open admissions policy has educated many minorities and low income New Yorkers successfully, since it began in the 1960s, some critics argue that it lowers the standards in education.
This debate became heated when the CUNY board of trustees learned, during the summer, that students at Hostos Community College were taking easier proficiency exams than students at other campuses. The “easier exam” was implemented in an attempt to test the students fairly based on the fact that Hostos is a bilingual college, with 75% of its student body speaking and taking classes in Spanish. The board of trustees forced an exit exam upon graduating students which would keep them from receiving their degree if they failed. Most of the students did fail the exam.
Henry Lesnick, a founding member of OAC and a faculty member in the English department at Hostos, said, “If you use an invalid, flawed and inappropriate measure, you’re not going to get results that are indicative of anything other than the deficiencies of the measure.” However, some feel that the CUNY board did the right thing in implementing this last minute exam to ensure that all graduating students were proficient in English. Kingsborough Community College is now requiring the exam of all students. The entire CUNY system might soon be required to pass these new proficiency exams.
In an interview for the Envoy, Rachel Laforest, President of Hunter College Student Government, said, “This system has always developed strategies to keep education away from the poor working class and people of color.” She feels that students are not being offered the education they deserve. With rising tuition, many students are forced to attend school part time and some are even dropping out.”
Kahil Shkymba, Consultant to the President of Student Government, points out that although our city’s economic growth is on the rise, so to is the increase in tuition. OAC hopes to bring awareness to the student body, who, they say, are often clueless about the Open Admissions Policy and the good it has done the city. Although the OAC conferences are still in the planning stages, the agenda is “to educate students in New York about the importance of educational access and to warn them of the immediate threat of its destruction.”
The open admissions debate has been hitting campuses world-wide.
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