Some Admissions Problems

IN THE early days of the American college, problems of admission were relatively simple. The student presented himself on the doorstep of the college and was enrolled, usually by the secretary of the faculty, but often by the president himself, in a big book which became the college register. The total administration of the college demanded only a small part of the energy of the staff. In the course of time, these colleges developed more self-consciousness and academic pride and began to reveal a hesitancy to receive young people whom they felt were not adequately prepared. Thus gradually grew what has become a most complicated set of academic entrance hurdles, the validity of which is now being questioned. It became clear that the colleges must provide some officer who would guarantee to the faculty that applicants had jumped these hurdles. Ultimately, the function of determining the qualifications of a candidate spread to other areas than the purely academic, and the officer in charge of admissions became a personnel officer, giving larger blocks of his time to the selection process. As costs of instruction increased and colleges were more dependent upon students' fees, the securing of students became a desperately difficult task, and the registrar took to the open road. He was given assistants in the form of drummer-boy recruiting agents who burned up the highways and infested high schools in their mad rush to secure enough students to provide adequate income for the budget and to prove to overzealous alumni that the college was great, not because of its integrity, but because it was growing in size. The principle of tooth and claw which has characterized the world of American business, however, cannot be applied successfully in college administration, if the college is to maintain its integrity and its dignity as the sponsor of the good, the beautiful, and the true, in an educational program designed to build character as well as to inform. Although there are still occasional skirmishes in the hinterland, the direction of effort has been shifted and attention has been fixed upon co-operative rather than competitive methodology. As the war clouds have cleared away and the sunshine of co-operation and mutual understanding has brought in a more temperate climate, the admissions

Mathematics education · Higher Education Research Studies · Psychology

• Higher education recruitment in the United States

  Susan Adams-Johnson, Jeff Cranmore et al.•Journal of Educational…•2018

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