The vast majority of first year students admitted to North Carolina are exempt from this course, but a small minority are granted admission with test or placement scores well below that of their peers, indicating the need to develop reading and writing skills necessary for navigating the UNC-CH curriculum.
To get a visual sense of the proportion of these "at-risk" first-year students to the rest of their class, I roughed out some average numbers from 2004 to 2012 -- also based on publicly released documents by UNC -- and depicted them in this diagram:
The largest circle (Carolina blue) represents all UNC freshman in a typical year, numbering about 4000 each year. Around 50 to 60 students (the small white + dark gray circles) are placed into ENG 100 (previously ENG 10) during their first year; usually in their Summer or Fall terms. That's about 1-2% of the total student body population.
Even though this is a very small minority of an entire UNC freshman class, the reason why this is, at all, controversial is because of the relatively large proportion of student-athletes in that segment. Though incoming 1st year athletes comprise only 5% of the whole student body (the light gray circle), they have typically represented 75% or more of the "at-risk" students taking Basic Writing.
"Committee cases" are those freshman applicants whose academic credentials are so low that the individual being advocated for admission -- typically by a representative of the athletics department if a student-athlete -- must be reviewed by a faculty committee, which then provides a recommendation on an admissions decision. At the time of this posting, I had not yet located numbers of non-athletes "committee cases" at UNC-CH, though I'm sure it would be some number equal to or less than the non-athlete "at-risk" students, represented by the small white circle.
Athletes, on the other hand, ranged from as high as 23 in the mid-2000s to a more recent low of 9, with numbers trending downward as criteria and admissions decisions at UNC-CH have tightened up in the wake of the scandal and subsequent reform measures. This segment is depicted in the orange circle: a subset of the "at-risk" student-athletes.
Committee cases represent less than 1% of the freshman student body, but they were 5-10% of the incoming athlete population, and, when added with the rest of those identified as "at risk," could account for nearly a quarter of admitted freshmen and 1st year students recruited to play athletics.
I'm all for high school students being allowed to leverage a special talent like athletics to gain an opportunity to pursue a college education. And I firmly believe (until it's explained to me otherwise) that a student-athlete who is given such an opportunity doesn't unfairly deny a non-athlete with better academically credentials his or her own chance for admission.
The problem arises, however, when that opportunity results in the student being put in a situation where he or she is at a disadvantage in the pursuit of academic success. Being admitted 'at-risk' means faculty and counseling staff must take responsibility to see that the student's needs are attended to and adequate resources are applied to make up whatever gap in readiness it was that has put him or her "at risk." The Basic Writing course, while not labeled as "remedial," certainly is designed to help bridge that gap, as are other programs and policies.
The student, of course, must also take responsibility and not have to be spoon-fed. The internal communications documents show multitudes of examples of counselors expressing frustration with student-athletes - probably many identified as "at-risk" - not taking their coursework seriously or who were only too willing to seek out the path of least resistance (at times with counselors and faculty abetting.)
"At-risk" students may struggle academically, but the wrong solution is to dilute the curriculum in order to "grease the skids." It may seem like helping, but it's like giving a child the candy he whines for to stifle hunger. Instead -- like good educational nutrition -- helping means giving those "at-risk" students a real chance to get up to speed in order to extract value from the University's educational offering.
IF there is or was a system that was designed or exploited to keep student-athletes eligible and out of academic difficulty, the liberal use of this "special committee" policy and acceptance of "at-risk" students would be the point of origin for pressure to create it. If admissions staff and faculty committees are willing to make such allowances for special talents, they must be willing to make the hard call to insist that athletic pursuits for those "at risk" be put on the back burner while and until the academic deficiency is adequately addressed. Athletic recruiters and coaches must also be on board and willing to wait for that student until an academic probationary period is completed and the academic gap sufficiently bridged. Otherwise, you wind up with what was uncovered at UNC, whether you want to call it, at worst, "academic fraud" or, at best, "good people just trying to help struggling students."
To other non-athletes or athletes not considered "at risk," failures by admissions, faculty and/or athletic leadership should not be seen as an indictment of the value and quality of their educational experience. Non-athletes need not feel like their education was tarnished if "at-risk" student-athletes were shuffled through the system, even if they did take a sip from the diluted curriculum.
Similarly, student-athletes withing the "at risk" group need not feel stigmatized if they wisely avoided or resisted watered-down curriculum path.
(I'm sure a few perfectly capable and academically prepared student-athletes opted to take the diluted academic path just to make life easier. I know more than a couple of non-athletes at Duke who gladly made the same kind of educationally-lacking, but GPA-inducing, choices.)
Speaking of "stigma", in this day and age, being "at-risk" should not be stigmatizing, particularly if a key cause for that is a learning disability or other well-founded diagnosis. The old "short bus" epithet really should be archaic as we now know that many bright, creative and capable students can succeed when given the right resources to overcome their disadvantages. But we can't sugarcoat "academically unprepared" and "at-risk" evaluations to avoid hurt feelings. Making and applying those assessments isn't disparagement. Such disadvantages have to be addressed honestly and sincerely. It isn't truly helpful to give such students so-called benefits of watered-down curricula that camouflage the core, underlying obstacles to authentic learning and education. College education has to be college-level education and not high school or middle school education masquerading as collegiate-level work, especially at a University seeking to maintain a prestigious academic reputation like UNC's.
The point I'm hoping to make is that even if "at risk" students are a small part of the student population, how faculty and staff respond in tailoring a curriculum to address them can have wider ranging impact beyond just devaluation of the collegiate educational experience. Admitting "at risk" students isn't bad in and of itself, unless the school fails to follow-through on the responsibility that comes with that admission decision. Frankly, that's a shared responsibility between:
- Faculty, who sign up to educate "committee cases" when recommending admission; and,
- Coaches, who ask for admissions exceptions; and,
- The student-athlete who is granted admission, who should understand academics is the primary reason for being a student and not a necessary evil while being an athlete.
Diluting a course of instruction is not the proper response, and the counselors and faculty who should be watchdogs for educational quality must be on guard and not let "bean counting" eligibility or faux progress toward graduation "block-checking" guide them. The correct thing to do is to address remediation and make the pursuit of academics a priority, even at the temporary expense of athletics participation. If you're not willing to do that, then don't grant special talent admissions.
(Go to Part 2)
