It occurred to me that if I am going to call this blog what I am calling it, maybe I should confess something.
Nothing juicy. Just an internal conflict I have long wrestled with, that previous entries have hinted at.
I worked for an open admissions, non-profit professional college. I directed Academic Support and Advising so worked extensively with many of the more "at risk" students in the school.
When I first started at the school, the tuition was low. Very low. Several thousand for an entire year. However, as has happened at many schools, it sky rocketed and is now closer to $20,000 a year. It used to be open admissions gave students a chance to "experiment" with a profession and it didn't cost them too much if they didn't make it.
As tuition increased, no longer.
Some of the open admission students we worked with we knew were not going to make it. They came from impossible backgrounds. While they had a high school degree, they had no academic preparation. There were behavioral issues. Sometimes even dependency issues. Since the school was open admissions, we had to take them. We might advise the weaker ones to defer or not attend, but they usually ignored us.
Let me give you a case study. This is a composite student. Unfortunately, not exaggerated. Possibly even less extreme than some I have experienced.
He was a new student who had barely graduated high school. His high school grade point average (GPA) was under 2.00, and though he was quite affable, he openly admitted he hated school. Yet he had taken out a loan for more than $10,000 and was attending college. Once the term started, he did not show up for many classes, nor turn in any work. It was clear to everyone who met with him he was not engaged by school and had no idea why he was there. However, he was also resistant to all advising and could not be counseled out. Since he had paid his tuition for the semester, we felt it was our ethical obligation to try and get him through.
And we did our best. We did a group intervention. We case-managed him through the semester, passing him from person to person. . His adviser met with him weekly. I or another tutor would sit down with him whenever we could. He was given extensions (that he met). And he pulled it together enough to get a C and passed the semester. He ended up on probation, but he passed.
Possibly a success story?
Then for the second semester he paid his tuition and tanked. He sporadically attended classes up to the deadline to keep his financial aid, then vanished. There were rumors of a serious family crisis but we never got any sort of documentation. We had to chase him down just to make sure he was still alive. He took a 0.00 GPA for the term and never returned.
So we put all this time and effort into getting him through that first semester - all so he could pay the school another semester of tuition but get nothing for it
Theoretically, there was no way to know positively that this student would not make it. But after you work with enough students like this, you get a sense of who will turn the corner and who won't. He wasn't going to. It was pretty clear from the start this student wasn't going to make it. Did we do him a disservice by not letting him flunk out that first semester? We did the ethical thing by helping him. Helping him extensively. But the ethical thing ended up putting him an extra few thousand dollars in debt. (I have seen students running financial aid scams. This is a student I would not put in that category.)
Which way is up here? I have had many students like this at several different schools. Some, against all odds, graduated. Some stayed in school an extra semester or two and paid a lot of tuition. Did I help really help them or did I just cost them more money?
I just want to know I am more part of the solution than part of the problem.
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