What does it mean if a university has open enrollment?

Question

like is it a good thing or a bad thing? and what excactly does it mean because i have no clue lol!

Answer 1

Most schools have admissions standards. You have to have a minimum GPA and a minimum ACT or SAT score to get in. The better the school, the higher the standards are.  The standards for some place like the Naval Academy or Harvard are just amazing.

Open enrollment means if you are breathing you can get in.

It is NOT a good thing.

A University is an elite organization, not everyone can get in. As with most such organizations, there is a good reason for this.

Right now the Olympics are on, so I'll try to explain it that way.  Not anybody can get on the Olympic team...in fact not everybody can try out for an Olympic team. The reason is if you let just anybody on the Olympic team, the slower members of the team are going to slow down everybody else.  You will get people who are nice people, fine people, who are kind to their grandma and always feed stray cats, but who just don't quite have what it takes to compete in the Olympics...and the coaches will take all their time trying to get these people up to speed...and that means the coaches aren't helping and concentrating on the people who really DO have a shot at winning a gold medal, and that is unfair to the folks who really do have what it takes.

In a university setting it works like this. People pay a lot of money to come to a University. They make a lot of sacrifices. They pay for a University level education...so it is not fair that they should have to spend expensive class time going over things that were taught (or at least should have been taught) in High School.  You go to University you are paying to learn Plato and Aristotle, not 9th Grade English.  It is sort of like when you see a whole bunch of Army troops running in formation...that formation can only go as fast as the slowest person in the goup, so one slow runner slows down the whole unit...and NOBODY moves forward very fast. If you wind up at a University where a big chunk of your class can't read at an 8th grade level...much less 12 grade level...well you just won't be getting to read Plato and Aristotle or any of the Great Books....you will have to settle for "dumbed down" versions.

Schools with higher admission standards are able to teach you more.  First of all, by making sure that everyone they admit IS ready to go to work right away  you don't waste time going over stuff you should already know. Lets say you go to a school with open enrollment you wind up spending the first month of the semester going over High School level work. That means you will only have two months left for the real University level work...so you won't learn as much as if you went to a school where you spent all three months of the semester doing University level work.

Second of all, since everyone there is bright and ready to work, you don' t have to settle for the dumbed down version of things. You can read Plato and Aristotle and Shakespeare and Chaucer in the original version, with all the big words left in.

Employers know that. They also know how hard it is to get into different schools.  That is why a degree from Harvard counts for more than a degree from Podunk State University and Car Care Center. Unless it is your ONLY option for a degree you don't want to go to a school with Open Admissions policy...it says to your potential employers "None of the Good Schools would take me, so I wound up there".   Now a degree from a cruddy school is still a degree and it is a lot better than no degree at all...but if you are going to be spending the upteen thousand dollars and four years it takes to get a University Education, you want to make sure that that time and that money are well spent, and you want to go to the very best school you can afford.

Answer 2

Open admissions means that there is usually no requirement other than a diploma./