Good job on new KU admission standards
Barb ShellyI once knew a kid who basically blew off his entire senior year of high school because he knew he could coast and still be admitted to the University of Kansas. I’m sure he wasn’t the only one.
So cheers to the Kansas Board of Regents, which today approved tighter admission standards proposed by the university.
To automatically qualify, students will need to achieve a GPA of a least 2.5 in the approved pre-college curriculum, along with a minimum 3.0 overall grade point average and scores of at least 24 in the ACT or 1090 in the SAT, or else a minimum 3.25 GPA and scores of at least 21 in the ACT or 980 in the SAT.
That’s fair enough. The standards don’t require super-high test scores if students do well in the classroom. They also sidestep consideration of class rank, which isn’t a very reliable measure. For students who don’t meet the standards but come close, a committee will consider applications on a case-by-case basis.
The new standards, which will take effect in 2016, are being criticized in some quarters as elitist and exclusionary. But KU’s retention rate is too high and its graduation rate too low. A school does no one any favors by taking tuition money from students unlikely to succeed, and in many cases leaving them strapped with debt and no diploma.
The new standards ought to be welcomed by high schools, too, as they should help ward off the senior slump.
Steven Fetter
66223
11 months ago“A school does no favors by taking tuition from students unlikely to succeed”.
You almost sound like a Republican. I am sure this statement does not apply to people living in food deserts, LGBT inclined, handicapped, or basketball players that cannot meet the new standards.
If you applied the new standards, the lack of diversity would cause more carve-outs than the tax code.
Christine Taylor-Butler
11 months agoI’m not sure I understand your praise of SAT scores so low they’re almost underground.
980? Out of 2400? According to the Collegeboard site (you can get the stats for the 2011 year) a composite score of 980 is 4th percentile. It means 96% of all students who took the test scored HIGHER than the KU applicant. A composite of 1090 is 9th percentile meaning 91% of all test takers scored higher than the KU applicant.
Is that supposed to make KU more competitive? I really wish you’d do the research before writing these editorials of praise. Was 980 a typo? It can’t possibly be the right score. Did you mean 1980? (92nd percentile)?
If not, I’m really worried for the low standards we set for our youth. Even a 24 on the ACT is not considered nationally competitive and certainly would not be qualified for interviews or admissions consideration at my college or my husband’s. :-(
Kent Mueller
11 months agoI have been out of KS long enough to not know that they moved to any threshold at all, other than a high school diploma. I am glad they have
I see this as an allocation of resources issue. We have seen student growth in the four year institutions. Some of our universities’ physical plant have been stretched to the limit. Things like classrooms, labs, dorms, parking lots (yeah, right, parking on campus, lol). The incremental cost for that student growth is huge when it involves constructing buildings. If we are smart, we would attribute that incremental per student cost not to the newest student, but to those students who barely qualify academically. It makes no sense to offer remedial type courses at the state university level. That is one of the several admirable charges of the community college system. Those with lower academics and/or needs for remedial classes should not be admitted to the highest cost institutions (the large four year schools) but rather should be admitted to the lower cost community colleges where they are equipped to handle that at a lower cost per student.