History Of Open Admissions Essay, Research Paper

Konovalova Veronica Poems of protest

In a poem Theme for English B, black student worries about an essay that he has to write for his English class in College. According to the description of the place of the school, I can assume that the school that he goes to is Columbia University, a very highly competitive school with very high standards. He is talking about being the only black student in his class and how it feels to be different from other people. The poem had been written in 1951 when getting into school was very tough, people had to do exceptionally well in school just to get into a City University. Most students in school were white and there were very few minorities in colleges. The story of CUNY’s experiment with open admissions explains important changes in college education since 1970. It also demonstrates the persistence of controversy about the meaning and value of equal educational opportunities.

Open Admissions has guaranteed that every New Yorker with a high school diploma or G.E.D. can attend a college in the City University. Open Admissions meant working people, the poor, people of color, and immigrants whose segregated, inferior public education may have failed to adequately prepare them for college-level work would not be denied the chance for a decent education a second time by being denied access to college. According to the research that I ve done, since Open Admissions was won in 1970, more than 450,000 students have earned their degrees from CUNY. Since 1970, more people of color have graduated from CUNY than have graduated from any other institution in the history of this country. After World War II, demand for higher education in US has increased rapidly each decade into the 1970s. By the end of the 1960s, an applicant needed high school grades of B-plus or higher to get into one of the four-year colleges, and at least a C-plus to get into a two-year institution. Getting into City College had become difficult at the time. According to my source during the 1950s, hundreds of thousands of whites had left the city, replaced by an equal number of African Americans and Puerto Ricans. Yet few of the children of these new residents got into City College or into CUNY’s other four-year colleges. They couldn t qualify because of their low high school grades. Open Admissions drastically changed the way education has been in our country the effect was amazing. According to statistics whereas 20,000 freshmen had matriculated in one CUNY institution or another in 1969, more than 35,000 showed up for registration in the fall of 1970. Forty percent of these newcomers to the senior colleges were open-admissions students. The proportion of black and Hispanic students in the entering class nearly tripled. At the same time, significant numbers of white middle-class students with solid if not spectacular academic backgrounds students who would have gone to college in any case. After five years, 26 percent of open-admissions students who entered a CUNY senior college in 1970 had graduated, 16 percent were still in school, and 58 percent had dropped out. By contrast, 48 percent of regular-admissions students had graduated, 12 percent were still in school, and 40 percent had dropped out. Desegregated by race, the figures show that 23 percent of black open-admissions students in the 1970 class, and just 19 percent of Hispanic students, had graduated by 1975. In contrast, approximately 35 percent of white open-admissions students had gotten their degrees. – http://www.puaf.umd.edu/IPPP/winter99/open_admissions_and_remedial_edu.htm, The gap between the graduation rates for minority open-admissions students (21 percent) and regular-admissions students (48 percent) was even more substantial. Most of minority open-admissions students were likely to be older then regular students and, they were also more likely to come from poor families, they were either part or fool time employers or had academic difficulties.

All the research above is a prove to what a difference open admissions have made, and what it meant to people who were not able to got to CUNY before. It changed their lives by giving them education that was available to them. Now minorities in colleges don t have to worry about writing their English essay to impress their white professors because they would be graded no differently from white students, and they won t have to worry about being different because they won t be alone.

P.S. The following information about open admissions have been taken from http://www.puaf.umd.edu/IPPP/winter99/open_admissions_and_remedial_edu.htm, which is a report from the Institute for Philosophy and public policy, a part of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland. The Institute examines topics of current interest as well as those that promise to be important in public policy debates in the coming decades. Research is conducted by individual resident scholars and by interdisciplinary working groups composed of philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, and historians. This diversity permits a comprehensive examination of the complex issues that the Institute explores.