The chancellor of City University of New York, the nation’s largest urban public university system, has approved a new standard that may make it harder for Black and Hispanic students to gain admittance.
Freshman students starting in the fall of 2008 will have to have a math SAT score 20 to 30 points higher than the current scores needed for admission to the university’s five top- tier colleges, Baruch, Brooklyn, City, Hunter and Queens and 11 senior colleges.
“Back in 1999, CUNY began a series of reforms to raise its standards in order to increase the value in CUNY degrees…and this is the most recent development,” said Jay Hershenson, secretary of the board and senior vice chancellor for University Relations.
Under the new standards, Hershenson said, students must score 510 or better in the math portion of the SAT or receive a 75 percent or higher in the state Regents Exam, taken in high school; or pass the CUNY assessment test given to incoming students.
The decision, made early this summer by the university chancellor Dr. Matthew Goldstein, is the result of several decisions with math professors who say students are unprepared for college-level work and administrators and the Board of Trustee.
The move is being widely criticized, including by faculty members.
“We are as concerned as some of the members of the faculty that raising the test score requirement will keep out some students who have decent academic [work ethics], particularly students of color,” said Robert Schaeffer, public education director for the National Center for Fair and Open Testing. FairTest is a nonprofit organization that works to end the use of standardized tests.
Schaffer said that the new standard will change the university’s unique make-up of students from all walks of life and culture and be a poor reflection of the city’s “ethnic composition.”
“The university system, until in the 1990s, was access-oriented; it gave students from low-income families a chance at higher education. In an effort to become a more elite institution, administrators are closing the door to the next generation of talent,” Schaeffer added.
