BYU freshman mentoring course bundles were created with the admirable goal of making it easier for students to “develop friendships, discuss concepts, participate in study groups, and be mutually supportive of each other.” Unfortunately there is a gaping hole in this well-intended system. 20% of incoming freshmen, who for valid reasons have chosen to live off-campus, are intellectually, socially, and academically disadvantaged by this program.
According to the University website: “Not living in the same housing area as others in your bundled, mentored classes limits your opportunities for making connections.” If this is true, then one in five freshmen are immediately disadvantaged because they chose different living arrangements.
Instead of creating a strong social network, the assignment of freshman mentoring bundles has successfully polarized the freshman population into two distinct groups—those with convenient access to the University and Campus Life, and those without. Instead of walking to the next apartment to do homework with a classmate, an off-campus student may have to travel across the valley to study or socialize with a classmate from his/her bundle.
This problem could be addressed by creating a makeup of students that more closely correlates to the actual proportions of the student body. 80-85% of students in any freshman mentoring bundle would live in the same area of on-campus housing, and the remainder would be a random sample of off-campus students. This would give off-campus students more balanced access to the “mutually supportive” connections that the University is trying to create.
Okay, I think I agree with you... So are you saying that each of the off-campus bundles should be comprised of students who live closer together? So people that live on the north side of campus should be put with other people on the north side?
ReplyDeleteWow! This is great! I totally agree with you! The system helps out the people that live with each other but is bad for us cause we never see our classmates except in class! I wish I had classes with freshmen that lived on campus so I could go do homework in their dorm. Oh well...fail by BYU.
ReplyDeleteI agree! Before school started I thought that we were going to be in a class with people close to us, but after talking to people in class I realized we live all over the place!
ReplyDeleteGreat argument! I don't have any suggestions, except for choose specifically who you'd send this to. I would recommend, rather than as a letter to the editor, use it as a letter to the Office of First year Experience (I think that's what it's called). They probably don't even realize how off-campus students are being disadvantaged.
ReplyDeleteResponse to David's question: I'm glad you asked, it was hard to explain it in under 250 words seeing as how I had planned to use this as a letter to the editor. I don't know why I hadn't thought about sending it straight to the Office of First year Experience as a letter, but I think that I will do that now.
ReplyDeleteI was proposing that only on-campus students be assigned bundles via location seeing as how this would probably be simpler for the university to actually do. I assumed that it would be simple for off-campus students to be worked into classes where convenient, but I'm sure that this is more complex than what I can foresee without knowing more about the MyMap programming.
If it's feasible, I think that it would be good to organize off-campus students by where they live too. This is of course second priority though because the school may not have access to this information when they need it or this may simply be impossible to carry out because of the complexity of scheduling people in classes.
Does that answer your question, or have I missed something?