students "asked to leave" university once it's discovered they're unqualified http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/us/indian-students-western-kentucky-university.html?_r=0
Stupidity all around. It sounds like the school got exactly what they asked for. I mostly feel sorry for the students who were led to believe they could succeed, and whose families wasted money on this non-education.
Isn't this how some of the for-profits got into hot water, with "predatory" recruiters who are paid per enrollment? Is Western Kentucky University so desperate for students and in such dire financial straits that they really needed to do this?
This sort of thing happens in personnel recruiting as well. A company says they need 10 electrical engineers and a company delivers 50 applicants with only marginally related experience and education. If the company places too much trust in the recruiter to vet those applicants then the company ends up on the hook for airfare and lodging expenses for 50 people who shouldn't even have made it past the original screening. What a waste of the university's time and money not to mention how unfair it was to the students. But if you show up to a graduate CS program unable to write code I'm not sure finding a "less rigorous" program elsewhere would really matter. Surely WKU could have found some of these students a home in business or other programs. I'm not normally a fan of just shuffling students from one program for which they are not qualified to another program for which they are not qualified but the students were given the impression that they were qualified. The recruiters sucked but fixing the problem should ultimately be WKU's responsibility at this point.
Agreed. I would expect WKU (1) to offer those students the remedial courses they need to qualify for the program into which they were accepted, and (2) to demand that the recruiters reimburse them for the cost for doing so (assuming the contract with them supports that reaction).
It sounded like they did offer remedial courses, but the students they're dismissing weren't even making the grade on those.
