RSSBuilding Barriers: Security Measures May Hinder College Access
Apr 30
Society and Culture College, Education, Social Missin, Virginia Tech Comments Off
As happens once or twice a generation, we have reached at a turning point forcing us to reevaluate our nation’s 4,000+ institutions of higher learning. For nearly four hundred years, American colleges have been fundamentally characterized by their service to society through the free exchange of ideas in the transmission and creation of knowledge. However, rather than focusing on the quality of learning, the touchstone of our moment in time is now campus safety and security. Instead of arguing about access, affordability, and accountability, we are focusing on the one issue that could have a major impact on our colleges relatively quickly -- to the detriment of their mission of social service through learning.
It has been suggested in the aftermath of the terrible tragedy at Virginia Tech that our nation’s colleges do not do enough to safeguard their students, faculty, and staff from violent intrusion. The “need” to identify new measures to secure our campuses is, however, largely ill-considered. While many colleges could benefit from minor tweaks to their policies or simply just freshening their training programs for crisis management, the need for whole scale overhaul, especially via legislation, seems a radical proposal. It is, however, one that we have heard about in the last two weeks from any number of pundits. The solutions proposed range from implementing such tight security measures that our campuses effectively become police states to violating long-established professional confidentialities which open our students to investigation at the drop of a hat. The most disturbing, however, involve changing the way by which we admit students to the hallowed halls by taking into account background checks or psychiatric histories.
Some of the most troubling scenarios revolve around requiring colleges to conduct background checks of their applicants. On the surface this may seem a wonderful idea, but it also raises disturbing considerations. First and foremost, the American justice system fundamentally revolves around the criminal’s debt to society, which we consider repaid when he or she completes a judicial sentence, whether it be jail time or other punitive measures. However, if we start using criminal background checks to deny the opportunity to matriculate, we saying as a society that our justice system does in fact not work and that the debt cannot be repaid.
The idea of considering psychological history as a criterion for admission is equally troubling. Even ignoring the potential legal ramifications with medical privacy and disability laws, this approach remains knotty. A growing percentage of young people have experienced psychological treatment or are seeking it out while they were in college. Yet the mere presence of certain psychological symptoms or behaviors does not paint a clear picture of a student who can be profiled as a danger. For every student who shows these symptoms and will commit a violent act or even threaten to, there are hundreds or thousands with the same profile who will do no such thing. Barriers to college based on psychological history would shut out a significant percentage of deserving students.
However, there is a far greater level on which this proposal concerns me, which would only exacerbate one of the most intractable problems plaguing higher education: access. A plethora of data exists through the National Center for Education Statistics demonstrating that the opportunity for a student to go on to college is tied closely to his or her socioeconomic status. Basically, the poorer the student, the more difficult it is for that student to obtain access to higher education, despite any and all financial aid and recruitment programs. We also know that violent crime, the type most likely to cause a student to be denied admittance to a college if undergoing a criminal background check, disproportionately affects those of lower socioeconomic status, as shown in US Department of Justice statistics. Furthermore, according to National Institute of Mental Health data, people who fall into the lowest socioeconomic status are two to three times more likely to suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder than their counterparts in the highest strata, so a history of mental health problems would pose yet another barrier to this group. Rather than fulfilling the college’s social mission to produce an educated society, we instead risk putting knowledge further out of reach and continuing to abide a socioeconomic class for whom advancement remains out of reach.
Including such background and psychological checks in the admissions process is admittedly one of the more radical ideas for reform that has come about for higher education and as such is unlikely to catch on in the form I have described. Even baby steps in this direction, though, could have dire consequences on how well colleges perform their very basic functions by severely constraining who is allowed the privilege of higher education. Locking up our campuses, literally or figuratively, is not the answer. We cannot lock away the precious commodity of knowledge and its concomitant benefits to both individual and society. To do so would fundamentally abrogate the mission of American higher education to serve society.
