quote:I can see that [bureaucracy in place to weed out the unpersistent] from Cor's experience in the hospital in the last month. The ER waits are so long that people who aren't truly desperate will leave. It also took several visits (now I've lost count) before they admitted her, instead of just giving her some strong drugs and sending her on her way. The issue for me, then, is if this is necessary or not, and in some cases I think it is. If the hospital doesn't have and can't get the resources to deal with everybody, then discouraging the unpersistent seems like a legitimate, if unpleasant, way to weed people out. But I'm sure I've seen circumstances where this bureaucratic hoop-jumping is not at all necessary. In fact, in a school where you are paying for classes, I can't think of why such bureaucracy is necessary. Paying students are customers. Heck, why is admission even necessary? If you're not up to it, let you fail out. If the classes are crowded, build more classrooms and hire more professors with the tuition of paying students. I don't see why somebody who can pay should be turned away at all. . . .
Except that they admit to themselves that they don't have the stomach to fail people, and so admitting weaker students will invariably result in grade inflation and a watered-down curriculum. It is easier to turn away or be unhelpful to somebody faceless than it is to fail a flesh-and-blood person in front of you. But it's less fair, because the faceless person might just have the drive or creativity or maturity to succeed despite the admissions' department prediction of failure. So even in this case, bureaucracy serves a purpose, but it's an illegitimate one in my mind. It doesn't protect scarce resources, but spinelessness.
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>> If you're not up to it, let you fail out. If the classes are crowded, build more classrooms and hire more professors with the tuition of paying students. I don't see why somebody who can pay should be turned away at all. . . . << (Icarus)
Are there also non-paying students, though?
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Sure there are. And I can justify the need for a bureaucracy for financial aid. Somehow the decision needs to be made on who is worthy of receiving it.
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So paying students who might not ultimately make the cut are admitted, but non-paying ones who might not make the cut are turned away? Have I got that right?
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Keep in mind that this is more about the need for bureaucracy than a serious discussion of how universities should work, but . . . more or less, yeah. If paying students don't make the cut, they lose their money. If non-paying students don't make the cut, resources are wasted on them.
Now, as to why this is not a serious discussion, if you are a paying student at a state institution, the state actually pays for a big chunk of your education. In Florida I seem to recall hearing it was like $6,000 a year or so. So paying students who don't make the cut are actually wasting resources. This would not be the case at a private school, though.
I'm getting the vibe that you have found something I said offensive and are feeling out my point of view before you jump on my case. And I think you're missing my point here, which is that the bureaucracy in this case is serving in place of high standards for admitted students. I'm not advocating screwing kids who need financial aid--I mean, come on, do you know what my background is? What I'm advocating is universities deciding how rigorous they want to be and stickig to it, rather than scheming to weed out those they find undesireable with scads of red tape.
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Sorry. I started to feel like it was a "It's hard to be a person who gets high test scores" kind of thread, and I wasn't sure how I felt about that, so I took it down.
I went to the school this afternoon, the graduate advisor said she'd do what she could to get in to let me start classes in less than a week, and then told me that I was applying to the wrong school and I needed to apply to better schools, I'd have no problem getting in where I wanted if I put together a package of the best I could do.
That was nice to hear - I've never heard that before. I don't think I quite believe her. But I think I'll take one class from this school for spring to help me put together a good admit package (and as a tryout so I don't have to quit my job and live on the streets while I try it out), and then apply to other places.
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For those who didn't read the other one, I want to take a grad class this spring. Class starts on Wednesday. I haven't applied yet, and I need to permission to register for the class.
I left a message with the grad advisor, who called me back and laughed at me. Then I told her my GPA and GRE score (taken in the poor part of Dallas), and she said she'd do whatever she could to get me admitted, to bring her my stuff that afternoon, and that she'd like to meet.
I felt like that was unfair, but Icky pointed out that I wasn't pulling strings that weren't related. I then decided it wasn't fair that she'd said it was impossible before, and that maybe the red tape existed to weed out the unpersistent and/or underqualified. In that case, it kind of works. I mean, I haven't applied anywhere else, and part of that is because it's an enormous, expensive pain and I'm not sure what I want out of it yet.
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