MOST STUDENTS worked painstakingly hard during high school to gain admission to the University. I remember it vividly: all-nighters, difficult classes and tests and more homework than you could fathom.
But how does it feel people you know who slacked off in high school successfully transfer to the University? Most students become irritated at this thought, to say the least, and it's a feeling that's become more prevalent after the adoption of the relatively new Virginia Community College System transfer policy as mandated by a Virginia bill.
The policy guarantees students from any one of the 23 community colleges within the VCCS admission to the University so long as they earned a cumulative GPA of 3.4 for 54 credits during two years.
Guaranteed admission? Is that fair? The question of fairness is often mentioned discussions of the VCCS transfer policy. And the reason for this intuition is compelling.
What's unobjectionable is the concept of accepting transfer students from VCCS through a normal transfer student procedure. Because there is no guaranteed admission for non-VCCS transfer students, a by-product is an asymmetry of competition. "The more VCCS students you take, the fewer four-year students you take from other schools," says Greg Roberts, associate dean of admissions. For this reason, the same standard should be applied to transfer students from other schools in satisfying a sense of fairness.
Save for any backdoor admissions policies that I might not be aware of at elite American universities, high school students aren't guaranteed admission to college. They fill out numerous applications -- a larger number each year -- and hope that they fulfill the necessary criteria for admission. For the lucky few who gain admission to these top-tier schools, they savor the reward they receive for fighting to distinguish themselves in high school. But then, there are inevitably some equally qualified students who aren't granted admission.
Just as every high school has it overachievers, so too are there the students who were never competitive within their high school's academic upper crust. Some (but not all) of them simply didn't care enough about academics at the time and went on to attend community college.
But along comes the University's new VCCS transfer policy. This is a godsend -- and a second chance -- for the high school underachievers all over Virginia.
The same policy, however, devalues the achievement of students who earned regular admission. Community college courses are by no means comparable to rigorous courses at the University. For this reason, it's fair to say that these students should not be guaranteed admission just because they fulfill a GPA requirement. Stellar performance at a community college is far from comparable to consistently excellent work in high school.
Along a similar line of reasoning, guaranteeing admission sends the message to college hopefuls that poor performance in high school can ultimately land you a level playing field with their school's cream of the crop.
One must consider the students who really didn't slack off in high school or who had other issues preventing them from entering the University through regular admissions, and these are certainly the types of VCCS transfer students who deserve to get a second chance.
A second chance, however, doesn't necessarily translate into being guaranteed admission. If the Office of Admission believes there is sufficient information made available through essays and grades to determine whether a transfer student truly exhibits promise and a motivation to study, then they should be able to make reasonable decision about whether to grant or deny admission. Yet apparently, this isn't the situation.
Although the grades of VCCS graduates might satisfy the admissions requirement, there is nothing in the procedure which accounts for the quality of essays. Even Roberts calls this "a gap in the agreement." First-year admissions applications are therefore much more difficult than VCCS transfer applications because it evaluates the applicant along multiple academic dimensions.
Suffice it to say, guaranteed admissions belittles the achievements of regularly admitted students. And, it belittles the very principles of exclusivity of an elite University environment.
Charles Lee's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at clee@cavalierdaily.com.
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