Admissions issues

Janice Finney, admissions director
Florida State University
Miami Herald

Discussing the difficulties admissions officers and others face in trying to identify academic fraud:

"I get 30,000 freshman applications. We accepted last year around 13,000. Most schools don't indicate who they're accredited with. I can say that (some) transcripts I've seen make it appear that the student has only been to one school. If someone went to a public school and transferred to a private school, it's supposed to be put on the transcript. If the school doesn't tell me, I don't know.

"The application doesn't say, 'How many schools have you attended?' We basically say, 'What school are you presently attending and when are you graduating?' "

Pat Herring, admissions director
University of Florida
Miami Herald

"I prefer to look at (verifying transcripts) as a shared responsibility. Certainly admission offices are the institutional authority, and we have been diligent and kind of the watchdog on this, but to say we are the last bastion..."

Greg Kannerstein, athletics director
Haverford College
New York Times

Discussing athletics' effect on the admissions process even at highly selective institutions:

"If we didn't recruit, we would lose every game we played. We wouldn't be the doormat of our conference; we would be under the cellar. There would be a lot of negative consequences to something like that. It is no longer possible to have intercollegiate athletics without recruiting or some degree of admission preference."

Hunter R. Rawlings III, interim president
Cornell University
New York Times

"First of all, whatever an institution tries to do, it ought to try and do it well. But there's more. In sports, people keep score. If (a school) gives a music concert, no one scores it a C-minus. But if you play a basketball game and lose, 87-42, everybody sees that in the newspaper the next day. There's no way around it. Your peers, your faculty, your students and your alumni all know the score. You lost, 87-42."

Robert Nathanson, associate professor
Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus
New York Times

Discussing a story in the Times on "diploma mills."

"The Times article paints a disturbing picture of student-athletes using watered-down correspondence courses to meet academic requirements for college admission and gaining little from their academic experiences. Clearly, in situations like these, the student is missing from the student-athlete equation.

"Having taught and advised hundreds of student-athletes at an NCAA Division I university since 1977, I have found that most, in fact, are academically focused and successful students. Not only do they benefit from their participation in the university community, but they also often contribute significantly to it. ...

"Contrary to the dumb-jock image that the article seemed to suggest, most student-athletes are students first, not merely surviving but thriving academically on campuses throughout the nation."