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As a remarkable result, C.U.N.Y.'s new freshman class includes 9,000 students who would have been flatly rejected under previous admission standards. One-third of the class is nonwhite, the biggest group of black and Puerto Rican freshmen in the U.S. The 9,000 include former laborers and domestics, cab drivers, carpenters and the sons and daughters of blue-collar workers. Many are the first in their families to enter college. They are awed—but all business. "These are the original American revolutionaries," says C.U.N.Y. Vice Chancellor Timothy Healy. "They want a piece of the action."
Automatic Degrees? Will they get it? At least half the freshmen need some remedial teaching before they can deal with college-level work. But no one yet knows whether the techniques that worked for SEEK students can be applied successfully on a mass scale. Many critics, including Spiro Agnew and some faculty members, fear that C.U.N.Y. risks turning itself into a college-level version of the failure-breeding high schools. Other skeptics contend that students who receive automatic college places may become embittered when they encounter persistent academic difficulties. If they then demand automatic degrees, they could devalue the credentials they yearn for.
By contrast, Bowker insists that changed admission standards will not change degree standards—at least so far as he can help it. To avoid easy promotion, flunking students will be allowed to try and try again as long as teachers feel that they are making progress. Some may take ten years to earn a degree; but they will be no novelty among C.U.N.Y.'s many part-time students. Bowker also plans a special incentive: some bright students may soon be allowed to plan their own curriculums around a subject that fascinates them, and earn a new kind of diploma, a "university degree." As for the problem of teaching C.U.N.Y.'s huge classes, Bowker is undaunted: the swarms of students arrived just as the U.S. produced a nationwide surplus of teachers in many fields. When the university set out to hire 1,000 more teachers last spring, a single ad in the New York Times drew 4,000 responses, many of them from young Ph.D.s avid to help C.U.N.Y. effect social change and get well paid for doing it.
Ultimately, Bowker hopes to attack poor education at its roots: the public schools. He thinks that the open-admissions policy is already encouraging more slum kids to try for college and refuse to settle for general diplomas. Even under C.U.N.Y.'s new policy, those entering four-year colleges must either have earned an 80% average or rank in the top half of their school classes. Bowker is also mindful that C.U.N.Y. supplies 60% of the city's schoolteachers and reasons that his new minority students will eventually raise the schools' low ratio (11%) of minority teachers. Moreover, he wants C.U.N.Y. to take over several city high schools and try new teaching methods. One idea: a flexible middle school that would span the last two years of high school and the first two of college.