Tuesday, November 27, 2007

SIU Student Turnover

Caught a brief bit from President Poshard on WSIU this morning regarding student turnover. Apparently about a third of all freshmen who enter SIU do not return for their sophomore year. Wonder how much of this is due to the pretty low admission requirements for freshmen? Taking a look at the admission requirements, it looks like an incoming student still only has to have a 2.0 on a 4.0 scale. I remember there was some controversy some years ago when the admission requirements were lowered from a 2.5 to a 2.0. Given that, is it reasonable to expect incoming students that barely evaded a D in their high school coursework to be able to handle the (hopefully) more rigorous coursework of college?

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How appropriate is the following analogy, in your opinion and in the opinion of your readers?

Walmart is to Macy's as SIU is to University of Illinois

I'd be curious to hear what people think.
 
siu is not as successful as walmart.
siu is to u_of_i as dollar general is to walmart.
 
I'd go more with Wal-mart is to Nordstorm's. U of I is considered one of the crown jewels in the academic crown of Illinois, much like Nordstorm's is one of the highest class retailers in the country. Still, I think the analogy is valid in terms of perception of the levels of the two. I don't think SIUC tries to pump people through as quickly at Wal-Mart does, though.
 
I was more thinking that you get something that looks the same, costs marginally less, but is generally not at all of the same quality. And not because the people who work there aren't trying. ;)
 
Bad analogy. Wal-Mart is a much more successful business than SIU, love it or hate it - and I'll be honest, I hate it. SIU has to get it's business together as far as not admitting resource draining and ill achieving "special admits" that only graduate at a 25% clip. What good are we doing letting those people in? They would be better served going to John A. Logan or a comparable community college. I'm sick of the special admits, they hurt us in the USNews scores, we have no obligation to admit them, and the Morris days of having it work to admit them are long gone, with schools being judged much more on what they get in and put out rather than how much they grow. Can we deep six this stupid admissions policy???
 
I agree with you Paladin. I think the lowered admissions policy was put in place as a response to declining enrollments during the 1990's: "Since fewer students are meeting our minimum standards, we'll lower the standards".
 
All analogies are imperfect paladin. ;)

In this case, I was using it to compare concern about the quality of the "products" being sold. Wal-Mart provides low cost fascimiles of the real thing; so does SIU. What's worse is we're doing because we want to become successful in the same way that Wal-Mart is...we want to move a lot of product and care less about how good the product is. I find it sad.
 
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