Open Admissions Working Group

The first article of our Social Contract is that our university will always have an open admissions policy. Very simply, this means that all students may attend. Now, we're not referring to some more restrictive subset of open admissions, where we are willing to consider the applications for all students, without discrimination based upon the litiny of common criteria. We mean explicitly that every student who wants to be part of this university will be immediately accepted as such. Thus, the sole criteria for attending the university is simply the desire to attend. This is true freedom of opportunity.

It is actually very interesting to consider a traditional university's stance on accepting students. Even though they consciously enfore admissions standards, they readily admit that a large percentage of students who are fully qualified to attend are denied admission because they lack the facilities and capabilities to accomodate these students. In many cases, the facilities and capabilities that they lack are not so much the educational resources of their faculty or teaching assistantships, but the brick-and-mortar infrastructure of dormitories, buildings, cafeterias, etc. Some small-liberal arts colleges have the fully-justifiable rational of maintaining small class size and hence intimate teacher-student interactions, but for many larger private institutes and almost all public institutes, class size is so large already that the additional qualified students are surely not denied admission on this criteria primarily. I think that these somewhat capricious admissions policies are disheartening and do not advance the state of education as a civilization. Therefore, we have an open admissions policy.

This working group is in charge of monitoring the effectiveness of this open admissions policy, and recommending larger institute policy to ensure that both advanced and remedial students are well-served by appropriate courses.

Current members:

None