Wait-Listed at CUNY, Part I: Open Admissions Dies Again
The gates of City College. Thrown open by open admissions, today they are slowly but surely being closed.
Earlier this summer, it was announced that CUNY has introduced a waiting list for undergraduate applicants, yet another departure from CUNY’s mission of serving the “whole people” of New York and another blow to CUNY’s open admissions policy, already significantly weakened by policy changes in 1976 and 1999.
Open admissions was created as a result of the historic 1969 City College student strike and occupation, during which the school was occupied for 13 days, with additional protests held at Brooklyn College, Queens College and several high schools. Before the strike, all CUNY schools were overwhelmingly white. At City College, located in the middle of Harlem (and renamed Harlem University by the student occupiers), less than 10% of the student body was non-white.
The Board of Higher Education created the open admissions policy as a direct result of the student occupation, although the actual specifics of the policy were contributed by Harry van Arsdale, the head of New York’s Central Labor Council, as described by the Graduate Center’s own Joshua Freeman in Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II.
In 1976, CUNY instituted tuition for the first time as a result of pressure from the financial industry. This resulted in over sixty thousand students dropping out, most of them students of color. This blow ended the intent of open admissions, but the policy remained officially intact until 1999, when the Board of Trustees ended remediation at the senior colleges, meaning that anyone who didn’t pass CUNY’s entrance exams had to go to one of the community colleges.
While this might seem like a reasonable requirement, its practical effect was to reduce minority and low-income enrollment at the senior colleges. At the time, the Board said that open admissions would remain in force at the community colleges, which they used to justify the claim that open admissions wasn’t really ending. However, critics argued that this was a step towards ending open admissions at CUNY in any form.
Now, eleven years later, the other shoe has dropped. Thanks to inadequate budget and facilities, CUNY’s community colleges are turning away applicants. This move will provide further fuel for the rapid growth off for-profit universities like Phoenix College and Kaplan University, a topic I’ll return to in a future post. The imposition of a waiting list is an example of “disaster capitalism”, the use of a natural or man-made crisis, in this case the financial crisis, to achieve economic or political goals of the ruling class not possible under normal conditions.
In this case, it serves the general privatization scheme pursued for the past twenty years by Democrats and Republicans alike in the US, and for the past four decades by the IMF in third-world countries. Today, public education represents one of the largest recession-proof revenue streams in the country, and for-profit corporations are salivating to get their hands on it. This same drive is also behind the massive push for charter schools in K-12 education, another topic I’ll be posting on in the future.
In the second part of this post, I’ll talk about how the wait list fits into the CUNY administration’s plans for the future of CUNY and other reactions to the new wait list.
Wait-Listed at CUNY, Part II: The Road to Privatization
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