Shannon Faulkner’s short career at The Citadel in 1995 and that institution’s treatment of her serve as metaphors for the careers of many under-prepared students in open-enrollment schools. Faulkner dreamed of attending The Citadel, but apparently she did not fully understand what she was getting herself into, for when finally she got there, she was packing twenty or so pounds of excess weight, a load she could not possibly carry through the extraordinary physical demands of the first week. Almost as soon as she arrived, she was gone, dreams blasted. And The Citadel could, I suppose, claim to have shown that females cannot make it there. 

Similarly, under-prepared students at open-enrollment schools often don’t understand what they are getting themselves into when they enroll. Lacking family lore or any other source of good information about the demands of college, they pack on impossibly heavy loads and, Shannon-like, quickly disappear, dreams blasted. And the institutions roll on, repeating semester after semester the same sad story, the same inhumane treatment. 

The casualty rate among first-year students in open-enrollment schools is, we know, appalling. For example, community colleges in Texas lose 60% of their first-year students (Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board 7), but—again in Texas—attempts to address the problem of excessive loads range from limited to nonexistent, as I found in a recent survey of 58 community and junior colleges. 

  Although 90% of respondents agreed that impossibly heavy loads are a problem, only 40% reported their schools do anything at all to try to discourage overloading. Wrote one administrator, “Work hours have NO consideration in course load. Yet it [sic] should.”  Wrote another, “The results of working too many hours are disastrous. . . . This is a big problem. . . . Many students will not listen . . . and [they] work too many hours and most of the time they will flunk out of college.”