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Smoke Signals, Wednesday, April 8, 198) —Page?
Hey Fellas, Mary Washington's Not Only for Girls!
By MICHAELARKUSH
FREDERICKSBURG, VA (CPS) -
In the increasingly-heated efforts ti
■'sell” campuses to high school seniors
deciding which college to attend, ad
ministrators have given away frisbees,
flown planes with advertising
streamers over high school football
stadiums, hired Madison Avenue
advertising firms, and purged
catalogues (at Antioch) of “anxiety-
provoking words.”
Now there’s a college recruiter who
wants to change his school's name to
make it more salable.
Richard Warner, an assistant pro
fessor who frequently recruits high
school seniors for Mary Washington
College, thinks the name “Mary
Washington” drives prospective
students away.
Warner claims both sexes want to go
to co-ed colleges these days, and that
•‘Mary Washington” just doesn’t sound
co-educational. Consequently, students
do not even seek information about the
school — which has had its name since
1908 — because they assume it does not
accept male apphcants.
■ I’ve sat alone at many college nights
Test Score
Value Held
Minimal
(CPS) — standardized test scores are
not as important for getting into college
as test critics claim, a new study of ad
missions procedures suggests.
A report by the College Entrance Ex
amination Board, which sponsors the
Scholastic Aptitude Test, and the
American Association of Collegiate
Registrars and Admissions Officers
says admissions procedures are
diverse enough to allow minority
students to get into college even if
"grade averages, class ranks, or ad
mission test scores were significantly
- lower than those of other applicants.”
In recent years standardized test
. critics have claimed the tests play too
large a role in deciding college ap
plicants’ fates. Those criticisms have
led to truth-in-testing laws in several
• states.
The laws give students access to test
-answers, and have been opposed by
; test-makers like the College Board as
inefficient, unnecessary and expensive.
: College Board President George Han-
: ford, among others, has argued that the
laws assume that admissions officers
weigh standardized tests in determin
ing gets into ■ school more than
: other factors.'
One reason the College Board under
took the just-released study of admis
sions procedures, Hanford says, was to
help support its anti-truth-in-testing
. law arguments.
■'Sure we wanted to prove what we
were saying,” Hanford says. “And I
think we’ve done so in a dispassionate,
iscientific way.”
• The two-year survey was of nearly
;i50fl college admissions offices.
More than half the admissions opera
tions "actively recruit students with
icharacteristics other than academic
talent,” Hanford pointed out in a writ
ten introduction to the report results.
Only two percent of the schools said
standardized test scores were the most
important admission factors. Nearly a
third of the admissions officers said
grades were the most important re
quirement.
But 60 percent said there was no
single most important factor in judging
an applicant.
A third of the schools regularly waive
academic standards for “special ad
mission” classes of applicants like
"nontraditional” (over 22-year-old)
students.
Accounting
Majors Seen
Best Bets
(CPS) — Become an accounting ma
jor.
! That’s the advice implicit in a new
report on job prospects by the
American Institute of Certified Public
Accountants (AICPA).
The institute predicts that demand
- for accountants, auditors and CPAs
which is already strong — will be even
stronger when the present freshman
class graduates in 19M.
CPA firms, according to the AICPA,
will hire some 32 percent of the accoun
ting majors who graduate in 19M, a
• three percent rise over 1979 hiring
levels.
; The AICPA, in its just-released
•.survey of job prospects, further sug-
gests that students go on for graduate
■accounting degrees. It expects that 56
percent of the students with masters
: degrees will be hired in 1984, compared
; to just 28 percent of the students with
:;baccalaureate degrees.
: And more of them wil be women. The
AICPA says that, by 1984, women will
: comprise 39 percent of the students get
ting accounting degrees.
: Job prospects for accountants
; typically improve during bad economic
;:times, when private businesses are
: more cost conscious.
at Virginia high schools,” he recalls,
“while many kids see our name next to
other women’s schools and go the other
way. I’ve gone up to them, and they say
they thought we only took women. ”
The professor concedes enrollment
figures have not been seriously crippled
by the school’s name, which honors
George Washington’s mother, but
claims the school’s sexual balance and
academic selectivity have suffered.
“We have about 2500 students, with a
7-1 ratio of females to males,” he says.
“That is not being sufficiently co-ed. To
make up for our enrollment problems,
we had to accept 81 percent of those
who applied last year. That’s not being
very selective.”
Warner’s name change proposal has
not gone unchallenged. Most often,
critics have accused him of being sexist
and insensitive to the needs of women in
modern society. So far, the school’s
librarian, Rudy Weinbrech, has leveled
the toughest attack.
"This name change business flies in
the face of getting society to think that
women can do anything they want to
do,” Weinbrech told Zodiac News Ser
vice. “Why change the name simply
because some men don’t like its sound.
Sarah Lawrence College and Notre
Dame University don’t seem to have
any problems.”
“Those schools such as Sarah
Lawrence and others are widely known.
They don’t have to tell anyone they’re
co-ed,” Warner counters.
Dudley Blodget, the admissions
director at Sarah I>awrence, says his
school’s enrollment has not suffered
from its name, but concedes “there
have been problems with some students
who were surprised to find out that we
are indeed co-ed.”
“But there's no way we’re going to
change our name,” he predicts.
At Mary Washington, Warner’s hopes
appear just as slim. The school’s Com
mittee on College Affairs has authoriz
ed a study to investigate its image at
high schools across the state. So far,
Warner says, those committee
members have been “quite surprised
by what they found.” But he admits
there is no serious talk of changing the
name.
“It’s not enough of a crisis yet. When
our enrolbnent really begins to suffer
from this, then we'll see some move
ment. When we need to fill out the col
lege, we’ll change the name,” he says.
And at that time, he thinks the Mary
Washington administration will
recognize the school's current name as
discriminatory.
Warner insists that "by giving the im
pression that we’re a women’s school
we are discriminating against men and
women who want to go to a co«d school,
but just don't know that we are co-ed. ”
He angrily dismisses accusations
that he himself is sexist by claiming to
be a strong supporter of women’s
rights. “People who don’t have any
facts on their side must use emotion” in
the name change discussion, he adds.
Warner, however, refuses to suggest
any college names that might make
Mary Washington into a first choice.
Some students were not as shy. Among
their proposals were “George’s Old
Lady’s College,” “My Mother's Place,”
and “The College of Mary and Her Son,
George.”
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BE ALL YOU CAN