CUNY Tightens Admissions Standards for Senior Colleges
by Advocate Staff
Chancellor Matthew Goldstein and the City University of New York have recently announced plans to raise undergraduate admissions standards for all of the university’s eleven senior colleges. The new plan, which would raise the minimum required SAT math scores for incoming freshmen from 480 to 500 at six of the 11 senior colleges, and from 480 to 510 at Baruch, Hunter, Queens, City, and Brooklyn Colleges, will go into effect in the fall of 2008.
Chancellor Goldstein has argued that the new test scores are necessary to make the university competitive with other local public and private colleges, saying that CUNY students in the past have been “woefully unprepared” for college level math courses. Goldstein also stated that the university was planning on raising the English requirements for new incoming freshmen but no specific numbers have yet been given.
Although Goldstein has his supporters among some math professors and college presidents, including Lehman College President Ricardo Fernandez, who, although hesitant at first, told The New York Times “perhaps I have become more convinced that students are able to rise to the challenge,” the announcements have also generated a lot of criticism.
The CUNY mission statement declares that the university will “maintain and expand its commitment to academic excellence and to the provision of equal access and opportunity for students, faculty and staff from all ethnic and racial groups…” but some have argued that the new admission standards are grossly undermining that historical commitment to equal access. Most notably, critics cite the startling statistic that since the end of remediation in 1999 the number of African American students attending the top five CUNY senior colleges has fallen from 20 to 14 percent, with African American enrollments at City College dropping by a full 12 percent.
According to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, the average SAT math score for African Americans in New York state was a mere 431, a full 69 points below the new requirements.
These new increases, however, come at a time when general SAT math and verbal scores are actually falling nationwide. According to the Aug. 28, 2007 New York Times, the average SAT verbal score fell for the second year in a row one percent from last year, while the math section fell three points from 518 to 515 – still five points above the new admissions standards for the “elite” senior colleges.
Students who said they intended to apply for financial aid, however, scored only 508 on the math score, two points below the new CUNY standards. Overall, Math scores on the SAT have fallen a full five percent since 2006. What all of this means, whether you support the idea of higher admissions scores or not, is that, just as in 1999, there will undoubtedly again be a significant drop in the number of working class and African American students able to attend CUNY’s top senior colleges, and an increasing number forced instead to attend one of CUNY’s many community colleges first before transferring.
As Stephen Steinberg, professor of sociology at Queens College, told The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, “this is yet another grim reminder that affirmative action is dead… The end result will be a segregated system with the vast majority of black students restricted to community colleges.”
