The Parmentier

College Unfairness: Is Money Speaking Louder Than Grades?

Thursday, May 31, 2012 By By Zari Havercome, Opinions Editor

Have any of you seniors gotten into the school of your dreams? Have you been accepted to institutions that have a great reputation? Have you gotten any of your runner-up choices? Most students in the Class of 2012 fit into at least one or all of the statements above. Another category that students also fit into is the group where you were rejected from schools you thought you definitely would get in to. Now, there are a large number of people that for some odd reason have gotten the golden letter of acceptance from a very competitive school that they doubted acceptance to and simultaneously received a rejection level from a school that they should have automatically got in to. Why is that? It boggles our minds that some of our very own students with great transcripts are being denied to CUNY and being accepted to schools like Boston University. It is understandable that schools would upgrade their requirement standards. But what does it mean when an institution changes too much? It disrupts a system of how the college advisors help students navigate their options. According to nytimes.com, many schools have increased their foreign acceptance percentages, noted especially in Chinese students. Additional changes for these exchange students have been increased in recent years. To understand what is going on it seems that straight-A students were not being accepted to some state schools for financial reasons. An example is the University of Washington; there have been a lot of seats being filled with more foreign students because they pay a higher tuition. International students pay nearly three times as much in tuition and fees according to seattletimes.nwsource.com. Due to budget cuts, the institution made the decision to increase the out-of-state acceptances in favor of domestic ones so that they may offset the money that they lost. It seems that money is making these institutions do what they may not want to do. In the end we realize that a college or university is a business first and an educational resource second. There seems to be nothing to do but roll with the punches and take the best offer for your individual circumstances and hope that if they have to make these decisions that at least it would fix itself so that this unfair system doesn’t affect more generations of college applicants than it has to.