[Alumni-chat] students with mental health problems

[alanbenard (alanbenard at pobox.com)]

Pam:

Thanks for your post and for the work you did to encourage due process and nuance in these decisions. 

Here is a link to a description of how transcripts from the "mentally ill" were flagged and given due-process consideration by a committee at the time the poster worked at Antioch Admissions. I'm not in favor of severely ill people attending Antioch for the reasons you stated. However, I am also not in favor of the preemtive rejection of any applicant who admits to having been treated for depression.

http://antiochians.org/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=27332#p27332

An excerpt from the post, by Seth Gordon:

>Students with physical, learning or, mental disabilities that self-disclosed were flagged. In addition, anyone over 23 (or 25), low gpa, home-schooled (in absence of traditional evaluation materials like a transcript), or simply a poorly written essay or an essay with a disturbing or inapropriate topic were all flagged for Special Review. This committee allowed people like myself an opportunity for a second opinion from people who had more expertise and would ultimately be serving these students. Of course these criteria may have changed as may have the process.
>
>This committee had six members -- admissions, dean of students, academic support, counseling, a co-op faculty and an academic faculty. Being put in special review was not, in itself, a negative. This was an opportunity for the staff at the college to be sure of anyone who had special needs and for the institution to evaluate whether it had the capacity to serve this student within the confines of its resources. Some students were often quite easy to evaluate -- such as home -schoolers; others were more difficult.  So for example a 24 year old student may have seemed benign but a 42 year  old on a residential campus was important to consider --both for them and for the students.
The impression one is left with, given that the report in the Yellow Springs News is accurate, is that this process was short-circuited at the first reading of application. 

There's a lot of pining for the "good old days" on this forum by some, and I guess that's what these folks mean -- unfair and presently illegal discrimination in the admission process without consideration by the college's professional staff under established due process. It sure was a lot more simple back then in those front porch and lemonade days.

Alan Benard