And the frosh dorm roommate with a felony conviction is probably vanishingly rare in any case.
Yes, there are felons (rapists, thieves, etc.) in the dorms, but they had not been convicted before they started college. Those who had been convicted as juveniles probably got derailed from the path to more selective residential colleges long before. Those who had been convicted as adults would, if they are committed to going straight and going to college, will be older non-traditional students, usually attending community colleges or commuter universities, at least to start with.
UCB- some of these rhetorical/conversational… “how would you feel if…” type questions. That said, your comment about @bookworm’s roommate has another possbility. If she had gotten treatment as a minor for what may have been a compulsive disorder/kleptomania or what have you, maybe she would not have been in the juvey system, might have gotten a handle on her problem and been a fine roommate and able to attend a residential college.
No @sylvan8798 - was simply addressing what @bookworm experienced. Would not feel comfortable with someone with a criminal/FELONY conviction in close proximity, and unsupervised, around my child’s possessions or in any situation that could put DS in an uncomfortable or compromising situation. There are already some roommies dealing drugs out of dorm rooms. No thanks!
You seem to be pretty good at asking questions (rhetorical or not) and making inaccurate assumptions/accusations, but even better at avoiding answering questions, or answering a question with another question. Reminds me of my late grandmother. She used to do that. You seem pretty hung up on whether we’d feel comfortable with felons in classrooms, on campuses, or as spouses of our kids. Seems like a sensitive spot for you.
Did @bookworm 's thieving roommate have a conviction before, or had she just not been caught or convicted before? If she had, she probably would have been someone’s roommate in juvenile hall, not college.
Screening out convicted felons does nothing against felons who have not been convicted yet.
Don’t know the background of @bookworm’s roomie, but am saying that if the girl had been “caught” earlier, or her behaviors had been addressed earlier, she might have gotten treatment (would think her behavior was not likely a surprise to her family) instead of, or maybe as a condition of some agreement to drop charges if her behavior was part of a compulsive disorder, or secondary to something else.
There’s also the factor that people are wrongfully convicted of crimes…including felonies. The newsmedia published plenty of stories over the years of folks whose felony convictions have been overturned due to factors ranging from overlooked evidence to misconduct by LEOs/the DA’s office/staff. The innocence project also has found this as shown below:
Look, many adcoms are young girls, Humanities majors, fresh out of college themselves, little life experience. Have you ever heard about “good girls love bad guys”? If you give them an option, they would admit lots of felons. For some people, it is sooooo cool! Cool MAN instead of the bookish-boys.
Sorry, but (re: post #108-- you added more after that) is simply ridiculous, @californiaa. There are admission policies the adcomms follow.
And @cobrat, just how many people freed by the innocence project are convicted felons now planning to be college freshmen living on campus? Sure its great that the innocence project gets some wrongful convictions overturned, but it is quite irrelevant to this discussion.
Actually, it’s quite relevant to this discussion as some posters here are acting as if all felony convictions are deserved and by implication, there’s no possibility LEOs and/or DAs haven’t made honest mistakes or worse, deliberately acted in a manner which guaranteed conviction of innocent people to serve their own personal*/professional agendas.
I.e. Pennsylvania judge who sentenced over 2000 juveniles to harsh sentences to fill for-profit prisons from which he received bribes:
Maybe this will be less of a problem as more and more community colleges start offering Bachelor’s degrees. My CC offers several, including Cyber Security and Project Management. I know of several other CCs in my state that either offer 4 year degrees themselves, or partner with a university to offer the classes needed on the CC campus. Every year one or two emails are sent out that a sex offender has enrolled (usually level 3, always some scary looking dude) and his photo and information is posted in buildings. So there are certainly people with records on my campus.
The initiative is asking colleges to look past criminal records in admissions. People are not admitted to college just to live in a dorm. Do you oppose the initiative altogether because your kid MIGHT end up in a dorm room with a CONVICTED FELON? There are CONVICTED FELONS in all walks of life and you or your kids may have been in closer situations with them than you knew or would have approved of.
You seem to enjoy living in the past @cobrat. Yes what that judge did was egregious (actually there were 2 judges involved in this , IIRC), but it unfolded 8-9 years ago, and at least one judge has probably been in the pokey himself for many years, having been convicted and sentenced to 28 years back in 2011, and thousands of convictions were thrown out. No none here passed any judgment as to whether or not felony convictions were deserved or not. That seems to be an excuse to weave the almost decade old Pennsylvania situation into this discussion. Were any of those wrongful convictions felonies? Doubtful. But the judge’s is. Good thing he is already finished with college.
However, until those convictions were thrown out, those 2000+ kids’ wrongful convictions were serious barriers to them moving on with life…along with having the handle the same types of prejudices/stigma from comfortable assumptions as shown by some posters on this thread that all convictions are merited ones without any nuance or examination on a case-by-case basis.
Many of those kids ended up losing their entire teen and even a substantial part of their early young adult years in limbo as a result of those wrongful convictions due to the judicial misconduct and corruption.
Sure seem touchy, @sylvan8798. You ask questions but you don’t want to be asked any… Hmm…
The discussion of the original criminal convictions morphed into a discussion of felony convictions many pages ago. Gotta keep up! Oh wait-- you did-- you responded directly to that discussion- twice…
BTW, @sylvan8798 , the quote of mine that you posted in post #113 was from my post # 102. I used that specific phrasiology back to you, as you had exclaimed
back in your post #99. Apologies if my point flew over your head.