College Of Tennessee System To Assure Spots For High 10% Of Excessive College College students
Dive Temporary:
- Tennessee excessive College college students within the high 10% of their class can be assured admission to a University of Tennessee System School beneath a brand new coverage accepted Friday.
- The system will even assure spots for highschool college students with a GPA of 4.0 or larger. And all the system’s campuses apart from the flagship — College of Tennessee, Knoxville — will settle for college students who earn an ACT composite rating of a minimum of 23 together with a 3.2 or larger GPA.
- The modifications imply to entice Tennessee college students to enroll within the state’s public schools. Throughout their assembly Friday, system officers bemoaned shedding college students to different southern states, akin to Georgia, Florida and Alabama.
Dive Perception:
The College of Tennessee System hopes the insurance policies will enhance enrollment throughout its 4 schools at a time when many establishments face heightened competitors over college students. Larger schooling leaders have lengthy braced for an anticipated dropoff in highschool graduates beginning round 2025 attributable to declining delivery charges through the Nice Recession.
“We have, as everyone knows, a shrinking pool of high school graduates,” Randy Boyd, the College of Tennessee System’s president, mentioned throughout Friday’s assembly. “Because of that, we need to be more proactive, we need to be more aggressive at attracting that shrinking pool.”
School-going charges are additionally decrease than they as soon as have been in Tennessee — an issue mirrored throughout a lot of the nation for the reason that coronavirus pandemic started.
Round 54% of Tennessee’s highschool class of 2022 instantly entered faculty after incomes their diploma, based on Analysis/college-going-reports/CGRpercent20Reportpercent20Classpercent20ofpercent202022_FINAL.pdf” rel=”noopener”>a June report from the state’s higher Education commission.
That marked a small improvement over the prior year’s cohort. But the college-going rate was still about 10 percentage points lower than the class of 2015 — roughly 64% of which enrolled in college after high school.
Officials hadn’t expected the college-going rate to decline, John Compton, chair of the system’s governing board, said during Friday’s meeting. That’s created “two headwinds” — fewer high school graduates and less of them opting for higher education, Compton said.
Similar admissions policies exist in other states. Texas launched its guaranteed admissions program for the top 10% of high schoolers in 1998, a couple years after the state banned race-conscious admissions.
At the time, Texas policymakers hoped the venture would foster racial and geographic diversity in public colleges. However, recent Research shows the program resulted in “little to no equity-producing changes” at the state’s public flagships. It did, however, increase the likelihood of non-suburban high schools sending their students to those institutions.
The Texas plan has also been scaled back. The University of Texas at Austin since 2019 only admits the top 6% of high school class members after applications to the selective college swelled.
The University of Tennessee System’s guaranteed admissions plan goes beyond Texas’ by also guaranteeing spots to students with qualifying GPA and ACT composite scores.
But board members didn’t extend this admissions pathway to its flagship, UT Knoxville, partly over concerns about capacity.
“I’d love to learn from other states who had to pull back on promises made,” said Jamie Woodson, a system board member. “I’d love to make promises and keep our promises.”
UT Knoxville will calculate a Student’s weighted GPA using 16 core Academic topics. Different campuses could select to make use of college students’ cumulative GPAs, based on the coverage language.
