My college did this. They don't have the strictest admission standards, but they're ranked well in STEM because of this. What's funny about people criticizing standardized tests in college admissions is, at least in a big school, 80% of your Calc I grade is effectively three standardized tests, so if someone's just "a bad test taker," throwing them into the deep end with 1200 other freshman engineers isn't doing them any favors.

My university, another state school, did the same sort of thing. They have something like a 50% graduation rate, and employ the same sort of washout techniques in science classes. My freshman CS classes dropped to less than a quarter of their initial size by the end of the first semester. The math department is very selective about transferring credits too, to stop people from taking an easier Calc class at a community college.

I can see a future cynical me talking about how brutal it is to lure poor students and have them take loans to pay first year tuition only to kick them out a year later with nothing to show for it, if they're not the top 1/3 for some reason.

This is in the context of a free education system, the only thing the poor students loose is a bit of time.

A year is A LOT of time, and you have to explain why you lost a year later on.

Also, even in "free" education systems, some taxpayer is going to ask "why the hell am I paying for 2/3 of crappy students, can't you just raise the bar at the beginning, and only accept the top 1/3?"

A year is a lot? Then what is 5 years, a lifetime? Let's not fool ourselves, a year is NOTHING, it passes as soon as it arrives. There is nothing bad with people "loosing" a year or two, or perhaps even more.

In an ever more pacing world, we should readjust and look back, some might "sacrifice" a year, but they also learn valuable experience so not all is lost.

Today, when people's work time can last 50 years easily, what is a year or more? Let people "search for themselves". Let them try out the hard things, let them explore and value experience, realize if something is for them or isn't.

In the end, we learn most from our mistakes, not successes.

I sometimes wish I could remember that a year is a short time. I’m often wracked by guilt about not progressing at sub-yearly “ticks” on some aspects.

It is not that they do not learn anything during that year. Also, many of them later got admitted to some 'easier' school and got their credits transferred.

> and you have to explain why you lost a year later on.

That's only if you do nothing else for the rest of the year...

not grandparent, but where i live it's the same system: ten years ago tuition were 230€/year until your master degree, roughly half got cut after the first year and a fifth/quarter the second year.

That's essentially the same argument Supreme Court justice Rehnquist made during a case regarding the use of affirmative action in university admissions.

Oh oh. Those are called Caribbean medical schools.

In some sense more fair, but also in some senses less kind and less efficient. Let me give an anecdotal view as someone who had a brush with it at another big state school.

University of Washington (Seattle) has a similar system in which some majors are 'capacity constrained' meaning some students would be directly admitted to the program, but the vast majority of them would only enter the major program after being accepted via application while already attending school.

Highly competitive programs included Business and Engineering, but this even spilled over into less popular STEM variants like Math. Their CS program was and is the most competitive of these. At its worst an application round would have ~2000 applications and only ~600 open slots.

During my time there, I met a handful of students that had applied every session for the last few years to no avail. The opportunity cost is enormous. It's both a waste of time and money on the part of the students to spend multiple years wasted taking intermediate courses, retaking major-application required courses and reapplying. That's why the administration is slowly converting over to deciding major on admission, too much visible grievance on the part of students.

That aside, if it's competitive enough, it turns into a second college admissions process. Students retake the core classes required for an application like they would retake the SAT or ACT. Never mind that they passed CS 142 with a 3.4, only a 4.0 will get them in so they waste a quarter perfecting the most basic java programs for content they learned a few months prior. Students also try to engineer around the competition: a common refrain was that the equivalent courses at community college were much easier, but given the same weight in the admissions process so students would go to another college to take an easier course just to have a better shot at their dream major.

The point is that the competition for these colleges will come to a head somewhere. If it's not the college application process then it will be at the school itself. It can be managed, but putting it off till later leads to a greater burden on the losers of this process. They are faced with the choice of changing majors, changing schools or persisting with the hope that maybe the fifth application will be different than the fourth.

Fostering this kind of environment was a mistake on the part of UW. Perhaps it would have been better if they restricted applications to first years and weeded them out completely from the start like they do in your area, but letting the college admissions process do it might be much more efficient on the part of both the schools and the students.

Or they could hire more teachers. Why is education competitive and exclusive? It makes no sense. The whole thing pays for itself in value creation.

Why have two or three instructors when you could have one associate Dean! The associate Dean even comes with a PhD! Never mind that it's in "educational leadership". That's the equivalent to a real topic. And it pays better too.

The reason people want to go to Harvard and MIT is because it's competitive and exclusive.

You can take the same courses online and buy all the same books but that doesn't prove you're smart and hard working enough to get into Harvard and MIT. Almost all of the value in going to Harvard over Boston community college is in the degree which proves you made it into an exclusive and competitive group.

Unfortunately, it probably doesn’t pay for itself in value creation (“Human Capital Theory”). If you’re interested in this topic, I’d recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education.

They essentially do, but on other campuses throughout the state. The prestige of a University of Washington degree is much higher than one from Eastern Washington University and the quality at UW is probably also higher than that of EWU and similar schools but a student is going to be better off getting out into the world getting hands on experience with a bit lesser quality education.

rather than accepting them for an entire year and then kicking 2/3rds of them out, why not don't kick them out and just teach three times as many students. feels more humane somehow

That’s called lowering your standards. It punishes the third who would have made it under the old system. Better to have a test. Doesn’t waste a year of the lives of the two thirds who drop out.

Me learning doesn't hurt you.

But lowering the standards does. And that’s the only way you’re going from a pass rate of a third to 100%. You might be able to double pass rates to two thirds by putting many more resources into teaching but that costs money or comes out of research time/teacher satisfaction. You learning does hurt the top of the class if you’re a marginal student. Students on the verge of failure take up a lot more instructional and administrative time than the top third who were going to get through anyway.

Ha, my school straight up bell curved the grades for most classes at the TA level so that a certain number of kids were always going to get a D/F both of which are not passing grades and thus requiring the student to either retake it or switch majors. I myself had to retake 3 classes to get through it and I have had to explain it to one of my parents clients whose son is in the program and has now retaken his 4th class as a junior.

It was pretty brutal but also highly effective at getting me to really study the material to stay above the curve and pass.

If they were going to get through anyway, then where's the harm in then diverting some attention to bring others along too?

Also, from the context given here it's not as black and white as pass vs non-pass or "lowering standards" - it's about a rolling cut off on the amount of students they can take.

What's wrong with spending more time on helping struggling students?

That it inevitably means dropping the most challenging i.e. most valuable parts of the course? Not only are resources not infinite; if you make them accessible to worse students, that necessarily means removing the parts which are inaccessible.

To play devils advocate its not free and by default the cost accrues to the more successful students who may not have the financial resources to pay the additional funds and may opt not to attend despite being quite qualified. In some cases you may be trading more qualified graduates for less.

For some the truth may be that their lack of success may be external issues that can't be resolved by an additional investment of staff resources or just unsuitability for the program that can't be resolved other than by picking a more suitable major.

There is of course in the context of US education which wastes massive amounts of money so the actual answer is to stop wasting money on sports and invest that money in students but in all cases resources remain finite and some failure rate is inevitable.

In the context of the US, the lack of proper financial support coupled with the lack of a proper vocational education system means that a lot of people go to college when they will not succeed.

In the case of struggling students. I think it's hard to dismiss a person because they struggle in a single course. I failed calculus 2 and now I'm about to finish a PhD doing statistics and machine learning. Should I have been "let go" so to speak upon that failure?

Failures matter when they are cumulative not singular. This is why early warning systems in education fail so much. They rarely have enough information to provide a warning that is actually early.

Good point

It does though. If a teacher has to teach 50 students instead of 17, that is a huge difference in the amount of attention any given student will have for help. Teachers scale better than some things, but not infinitely.

The most important benefit of a university degree is the credential itself, indicating personal characteristics of the graduate. Lowering standards directly hurts the value of said credential. Learning is a side-effect of the process.

You are correct but isn't that strange and defective?

If you're not making into year 2 (or year 3), you can repeat ad vitam aeternam.

Now the school has a bad reputation, and students who spent four years of time and tuition have a diploma worth nothing?

Students are only occasionally actually kicked out. Much more common is that they struggle with the coursework, decide it isn't for them, and pick a different direction.

How many years of time do you think it is humane to provide to a student before suggesting somehow that they might consider an alternate use of their time?

Where I went, there was a hierarchy of lesser degrees to pick from.

That is a very expensive way of deciding who gets a degree. Also, it doesn't eliminate the problem of scarcity with those first year seats. You still need to decide who gets the chance to try in year 1.

The colleges also make more money that way. A 500 person freshman lecture class is a money maker. A 50 person capstone class is a money loser. I agree it's nice to give people a chance but it's not all rose considering the debt many of those people who don't make it take on.

What does those 2/3rd do then? Do they lose a year?

That depends on the student's choices. I dated a woman in college who was trying to get a degree in speech pathology. Because it was an "impacted" program, they use the process of having students take general core courses and then reevaluating them. She didn't get into the program after her first year. Given the choice of taking degree adjacent courses for a year or changing majors, she chose to go into special education instead. There were other schools in the state that offered speech pathology but they were branch campuses. Given the choice between speech pathology from a directional school or a special education degree from Big State University, she went with special education. That was her choice. From what I can tell from her Facebook posts, it seems to have worked out well for her.