Raise the bar on entrance requirements ...
Keeping the riff-raff out
Jesse Beach, Volunteer Staff
Of all the sacrifices and hardships that average university students endure over the course of completing their degree, there is one continual annoyance that I think we can all agree is not only most irritating, but is also the most devastating to the University of Manitoba — juvenile, uncomprehending first-years.
The University of Manitoba, by setting its entrance requirements so low, is setting up prospective students to fail.
This is not to say that we are the only university that must endure the everlasting annoyance of immature first-year students, but the phenomenon is undoubtedly worse at the University of Manitoba due to our open-door entrance requirements. Coming out of high school, a prospective applicant can be accepted at the U of M with “limited admission” with only a 63 per cent average across three Grade 12 courses: not an overall average, a 63 per cent average over three courses. This is not exactly opening the door to merely the best and brightest. We all realize that there are vast differences between university and high school and, in most cases, if you are barely earning a C in high school courses that level of commitment you are putting into your schoolwork will not translate into success in university .
Not to sound pompous, but these are the students who are disrupting us in St. Paul’s cafeteria while honest third and fourth years are trying to study; these are the kids who are answering their cellphones in the libraries, carrying on extended conversations while others are reading; these are the insecure people who actually come to school wearing designer clothes and makeup, making us older students, who have long since stopped caring about our appearance while at school, look even scrubbier by comparison.
Consider this statistic, and this is directed to any 12th grader who may be reading: out of the 1,479 full-time students who enrolled in University 1 in September 2004, myself included, only 897 continued to their second year. That is only a 61 per cent retention rate, which essentially translates to this: if you are a first-year student, look at the kid on either side of you in your next class, because one of you won’t be coming back next year .
This is not to sound unduly harsh, because the open-door policies in which we accept our prospective students are not only annoying to veteran students, it is potentially damaging to the first-years in question. Tuition is an investment in your future, that is how it is justified anyway, but if 40 per cent of students are not returning after their first year, then there are hundreds of students wasting a year’s worth of tuition for nothing. Good news for the university, which gets to walk away with the cash, but you have to sympathize with those who are walking away with nothing.
Not to mention ruining your GPA for life. Let’s say you are one of those students who dropped out of school after a year, but after some growing up, you want to return to the world of academia. One problem: you’re on academic suspension for the 1.4 grade point average you compiled in that write-off year and, even if you are able to re-enter school, you are starting in a hole that you will be forced to try to recover from for the rest of your university career.
This is not to say that those who graduate high school with a C average should not attend university, there are many who come to the U of M with a renewed vigor for education, outdoing those pompous high school A students. However, this is a minority of the population. I believe it would be better if those students with lacklustre grades waited awhile before entering university. Save the year, save the tuition. Find out who you are and what you want to do with your life before you commit so much. If a student finds that university is the life for them, they can go back and upgrade their high school courses, apply to university feeling that they deserve to be there, thus causing them to work harder than if they had just walked in straight out of high school.
It’s a simple matter of pride. No one is going to take pride in something, even his or her education, if he or she did not work for it. With such low entrance requirements, not only is the U of M accepting students who do not take pride in their educations and thus indirectly encouraging them to fail, it is also lowering the level of pride current students take in the university itself with such low expectations of the student body.
The University of Manitoba, by setting its entrance requirements so low, is setting up prospective students to fail. It may be an effective cash-grab system, but it is deteriorating the amount of respect and pride in which current students have in their school. We are effectively ruining the future of potential community leaders by allowing them to fail from the outset, simultaneously discouraging them from future attempts at education, while also forcing them to start in-the-hole if they do return. It is the responsibility of our university to raise the current entrance requirements, if not because it is the right thing to do, then at least to keep the noise down in the libraries.
Jesse Beach is a fourth-year English student.
