In 2009, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports today, Thomas Hickey, then Dean of Arts and Sciences at SUNY-Cobbleskill, filed a whistleblower lawsuit that “accused the institution of recruiting and retaining underqualified black students in order to increase tuition revenue.” He claimed, according to the Albany Times Union, “that Cobleskill recruited academically unqualified students who had no chance of earning a degree in order to collect tuition dollars.”
On Friday the jury disagreed, finding for the college, but it’s not clear from the reports whether their finding was based on a belief that Hickey’s charges were false — SUNY lawyers described him as “disgruntled and said he had been dismissed from other schools for incompetence and was prone to file lawsuits” (before or after SUNY hired him?) — or whether they rejected his claim that admitting underqualified black students it knew would fail to graduate amounted to racial discrimination.
How does (ie)SUNY Cobleskill lose “tuition dollars” by demanding demonstrable aptitude for expectations of academic excellence from candidates as a prerequisite?
Are there too few of such candidates for higher “education”?
What is their “quota” for potential “gentlemans C” candidates who can simply pay their own full freight for a certificate of attendance at a McUniversity?
These are all private, candidate generated, “tuition dollars” of which we speak, right?