ALL ACROSS the country, nervous high school students are checking their inboxes in anticipation. They know that an email from the University's Office of Admissions is due any day now. They worked hard in high school taking Advanced Placement classes and studying for those three hour exams, but last week the University decided it doesn't care. The Integrated Student Information System Task Force has recommended that AP/IB credits no longer be used to compute course hours for order of course registration. This decision not only threatens the University's competitiveness for attracting top high school students, but represents an attack on merit. The further contention that this somehow helps poor students could not be further from the truth: It merely hurts those determined to do work hard and be well-educated.
The University has made the bold proposition that it is improving efficiency with the policy change. J. Milton Adams, vice provost for academic programs, told The Cavalier Daily that the goal was to streamline the operation of ISIS. But in reality, the change in no way makes things easier. Incoming students with a high number of AP credits are unlikely to need to take many lower level courses. Now they will be unable to get into upper level courses. Given that advanced standing credits will not count, all first year students, regardless of high school course load, walk in with no credits. Therefore, any older student will be able to register earlier, effectively precluding first year students from taking any advanced classes. This puts highly qualified students in an awkward position: They can either retake classes for which they have advanced standing or take lower level courses in subjects in which they have no interest. Adams could not be reached for further comment.
At first glance this seems to be a minor nuisance for only a few students. But digging deeper reveals that this decision runs counter to the University's top priorities. The Board of Visitors talks constantly about improving the University's ranking. This cannot be accomplished without recruiting and retaining the best students from high schools around the country -- the types of students who have copious amounts of AP credit. The new policy is a clear deterrent to these students, since it strips them of the chance to take the courses for which they are qualified anytime in their first few semesters. Furthermore, a study published last month by a team of Texas researchers found that good scores on AP Exams correlate with better college grades and graduation rates. The University has given away one of its best tools for competing against other highly regarded universities for top-tier undergraduates.
Kathryn Serra, co-chair of the Academic Affairs Committee of Student Council, offered an additional reason for the change: equality. She argues that poorer students tend to go to worse high schools that offer fewer AP courses. Therefore, the policy switch was also based on "socioeconomic considerations." Given that there has been no evidence presented for this, debating its merits is difficult. However, the very issue is itself irrelevant. If a student comes in with little AP credit, whether as a result of choice or income, then he does not need to register earlier because he must take introductory courses first. It's only students with a great deal of AP credit who have a legitimate need to register earlier and get into upper level courses since they've already taken most introductory courses.
Thomas Jefferson waxed poetic about his dream of an "aristocracy of merit" that anyone was free to join. But at the very University he founded to achieve this goal, meritocracy is being attacked.
The administration has instituted policies that both limit course availability to highly qualified incoming students and deter these same students from matriculating. The University ought to be pursuing every recruitment advantage it can find, rather than throwing them away.
Furthermore, the University must be careful if it changes its policies to restrict the supposed privileges of the rich. Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek warned that there aremore insidious ways that the rich and well-connected could use their power than towards achieving academic success. If the rich insist on taking difficult course loads to become productive members of society, that's certainly not the worst thing that could happen.
Josh Levy's columns appear Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at jlevy@cavalierdaily.com.
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