In Old Westbury, N.Y., student Denisha Dennis started the semester on a sour note.
She received a letter from the administration informing her that because of her GPA, she was being removed from the dorms and getting kicked off her meal plan.
Now, according to an article in The New York Times, Dennis makes a five-hour round-trip commute from her parents’ home in Mount Vernon, N.Y. to the State University of New York, since non-university housing is rare in the area.
This punishment is too harsh for someone whose GPA dropped below a 2.0 when she got sick during finals week. Revoking students’ housing and taking away their food is not a constructive way of encouraging students to do better in school.
The university should offer help to students whose grades are slipping instead of taking even more time out of their study schedule by forcing them to commute. At the least, students should have an additional semester to bring their GPA up before losing their housing.
Frankly, housing and grades should be kept separate. Students concerned with improving their grades don’t need the additional hassle of finding a last-minute place to live and figuring out how to commute to campus.
UCLA has a much more fair system in place. Students whose GPA drops below a 2.0 but remains above a 1.5 are placed on “academic probation” for the following two quarters, at which point their cumulative GPA (the average of all the grades in all the classes they’ve taken) should be raised to a 2.0 or better.
If their term GPA (just the grade average from that quarter) falls below a 2.0, or if their GPA is below a 1.5 at any point, the students become “subject to dismissal.” At this point, individual plans will be made to improve their academic performance. Many departments require or at least encourage these students to meet with counselors.
Most importantly, students’ classroom achievement or lack thereof has no bearing on their housing contract.
Thankfully UCLA appears uninterested in SUNY Old Westbury’s style of “pass-or-be-punished” discipline, but if our school ever is, we at the editorial board have a few suggestions to make the system more comprehensive:
Students with a 3.6 or above get their own private rooms in Hitch or Saxon Suites. Students with a 3.2 or above get private rooms in Rieber Vista or Hedrick Summit. On these “high-achiever” floors, maid service will come through daily with concierge and laundry service.
Students with a 2.5 or higher will be in doubles in the suites. Their floors will feature a vending machine that is always stocked, functioning laundry machines and a coffeemaker. Students below a 2.5 but above a 2.0 will live in doubles in the high rises. Someone will come through with a vacuum at 7:30 every morning.
Students on “academic probation” will be subject to triples in the dorms. They will have to live on the opposite side of the hall from their gender’s bathroom, and the people next door will go home every weekend but leave their alarms set for 8 a.m.
Finally, students who are “subject to dismissal” will live in quadruples and quintuples and be forced to hand-wash their and their resident assistant’s laundry. The bathrooms will not be cleaned daily and they will have to share the room with members of rock bands who must practice drumming from midnight until 4 a.m. nightly.
Luckily, UCLA seems sane enough not to adopt our proposals, but if SUNY Old Westbury is interested in our consulting services, we would love to help them further develop their sadistic system.