And your college-educated self may be paying more in taxes to support them during their incarcerations, which are highly likely to happen at some point to at least some of them if they dropped out. It’s like it’s the circle of life, or something.
Please link to where I said an institution should not be able to ask questions about someone’s past behavior. In fact, if you’ll notice I “liked” fallenchemist’s post in which he advocates for keeping the question but being more understanding of what that answer means in the context of our society.
That is true, however I was more directly addressing post #4 in which the poster said they “do not want their child rooming with a felon.” And that “the question should be… have you ever been convicted of a felony. (we are not interested in misdemeanors or in school discipline)” Why that distinction? In that scenario, petty theft or punching someone at school need not even be disclosed at all, but the theft of 5 xbox games must be mentioned and precludes the student from being allowed on campus.
Seriously folks, the “drop the box” campaign says that AFTER the person is selected for an interview, the company CAN ask about such status, and HAS to for certain jobs.
“Dropping the box” in regards to not asking about school discipline or criminal history on the application means what - you ask AFTER the student is admitted, and THEN tell them that their school discipline record or criminal record disqualifies them, is that any better? It’s worse IMHO.
In the early decision round I agree that this is potentially more harmful because it would influence how a student applies to other schools, but in the RD round it would have essentially no impact as long as it was a well disseminated and established policy, and it was handled prior to the May 1st deadline (The latter in particular I’ll admit might be unrealistic). Colleges are simultaneously “hiring” way more “employees” at the same time than the vast, vast majority of companies. For example, I was required to submit a background check and drug test to my medical school only after I was admitted. I assume I could have easily had my acceptance rescinded if they didn’t like what they saw. I was asked about a criminal history on the “common app” that is used by literally all medical schools, but I was not asked about a history of drug use. Not all medical schools do an additional background check or drug test prior to enrollment. Again, it’s a smaller number of people the school is dealing with and that could be an issue for undergraduate schools.
Assuming it’s realistic to handle everything in a timely manner, doing things post acceptance could be better because in that scenario, you’re essentially deciding whether or not you want to rescind the applicant vs. not accept them. That falls in the applicant’s favor because the threshold for rescinding an accepted student seems to be much higher than the threshold for accepting them from the competitive pool. This would require that the AdCom truly believes that this applicant’s past makes them a risk to be on campus such that they have to actually revoke an acceptance rather than simply saying “These two kids are pretty close, I’ll just take the one without an out of school suspension on his record.” That particular line of thinking can be especially tricky when it can be shown (in MA public schools for example) that black and latino students are more likely to be punished harsher for committing non-violent, non-criminal, non-drug offenses, even when controlling for rate and history of prior infractions as their white and asian classmates (Main finding 4, first mentioned on pages 3-4, discussed more on 12-13: http://lawyerscom.org/not-measuring-up/).
I do think the most important point made in this whole discussion was by @WasatchWriter: at least one study of various schools showed that this kind of screening made no difference in terms of campus safety. That should certainly give us pause make us at least question what exactly we’re accomplishing if we’re not accomplishing the goal of a safer campus.
Well, do colleges reject students because they checked the box? Do they reject minority students for checking the box at the same rate they reject non-minority students who check the box? How much does the severity of the reported offense track the likelihood of rejection? In other words, is there even a problem?
It is likely that there is little good data on this subject from a selective college admission standpoint. Students who get into disciplinary or legal trouble are more likely to get derailed from the college path to begin with.
Those are great questions @Hunt. I think @ucbalumnus is right though that good data on this issue will be hard to come by. Even before UCB’s point about confounding factors, I doubt schools would be willing to even just release the straight up admission rates of felons, misdemeanor convicts, and applicants with institutional action only. Maybe there’s some way to compel public schools to do so but I can’t even imagine a scenario where private schools would be forced to release that data.
Personally, I find it hard to believe that checking the box doesn’t put you at a disadvantage vs. not checking it - admissions already spends so little time reading an application chocked full of info - why ask it if they aren’t going to use that info?
This is a very interesting question. I didn’t even think this was really a motivator of ban the box people, although maybe it is because for example in some *studies/i it’s been shown that a white person with a criminal record has equal or even greater chances of being hired than a black person with no record and that women with criminal records fared better than men with criminal records (http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2008/08/09/study-black-man-and-white-felon-same-chances-for-hire/ and https://csgjusticecenter.org/reentry/posts/researchers-examine-effects-of-a-criminal-record-on-prospects-for-employment/).
" ‘Dropping the box’ in regards to not asking about school discipline or criminal history on the application means what - you ask AFTER the student is admitted, and THEN tell them that their school discipline record or criminal record disqualifies them, is that any better? It’s worse IMHO."
Time frames playing a key role here, and acknowledging poster Brown’s comment to the potential impracticality of adding more work for adcoms in the college application process, if an applicant knows there is the possibility of a delay of a decision, or even a provisional acceptance subject to a determination of the nature of a disclosure, quite often an applicant will self-screen. Ultimately, this means that students with more serious offenses (i.e., though which have been adjudicated) will probably seek admission to schools where such questions are not asked, or are (anecdotally, I suppose) known to the students to have no overwhelming influence on the outcome of the admissions decisions.
But notification of the potential steps a college can make after a disclosure is made could be boiler-plate.
Adults self-screen all the time when asked to volunteer for positions where a criminal background check may disqualify them from hands-on participation with children or other vulnerable populations. When a successful working adult does not assume that a 22-year old traffic offense, something which occurred when they were 19, will show up as a disqualifying mark for volunteering, they are shocked to know they are placed in a holding pattern until a series of checks can be done.
No less likely to be made incredulous to know that the stolen gumball incident from their childhood has shown up to brand them lacking in character as they seek to enter college, after a series of such “returns” of applications, young people are no less inclined to find themselves in a position of self-screening.
I clearly see how this can lead to an imbalance in the applicant pool of qualified, motivated students. I understand the concern of parents who are sending their kids off to college, as I am firmly ensconced in that group, but I am not naive enough to believe that the kid who was not disciplined, or whose record does not reflect a disciplinary action, has nothing to report.
Not every high school disciplinary incident will be viewed negatively by every admissions committee. Colleges do have an obligation to keep the their campuses safe and they would be remiss not to at least inquire about incidents that may include violence or harassment.
I’m a minority with a disciplinary record that applied to 10 elite universities and was accepted to just Columbia University during RD. Even though my chances would have been better if I didn’t have to write a DA essay, I’m not certain that this would have translated to more acceptances. My first reader at Columbia must have reacted favorably to my application and fought for me during committee. I don’t support having the DA question removed. College admissions officers are intelligent enough to analyze an applicant’s DA record in the context of their application, and at least in my case, 2 colleges communicated with my GC about the incident. Having a DA record is not a death stroke.
Apologies, but that made me laugh. “just” Columbia? Congrats!!
I know several guys who had DAs that got into great colleges. College Admissions Officers get it.