Burnt Orange Report

How to Reduce UT Enrollment

By Byron LaMasters

As the largest University in the country with over 50,000 students, we're always talking about ways to deal with the enrollment issues we have at UT. This year, our freshman class is smaller than from the past couple of years as fewer students were admitted. Another proposal has been to limit students to five years (10 long semesters) at the University. Still, we're always looking for ways to reduce enrollment even further. A Daily Texan opinion collumn last week had several interesting ideas. Here's some of the collumn with my favorite ideas:

The Enrollment Task Force, given more than a year of research, has come up with a list of strategies that at best would modestly reduce the number of fifth-year seniors and at worst would punish students who have to take a foreign language. Yours truly, given a couple of days, has come up with a list of suggestions that would at best reduce the numbers of incoming freshmen and at worst turn this campus into an unbearable war zone.

[...]

Young Conservatives of Texas on the Welcome Committee

Nothing says open arms like a group whose ideas to better campus include the erection of a Ten Commandments statue. Say goodbye to "Gone to Texas," and say hello to "Gone to Protest a Dixie Chicks Concert." It would allow the YCT to profile any students they deem dangerous and would cut down freshman enrollment by at least 20 percent, though those excluded would probably be mostly minority students.

Turn the West, South and East Malls into Unrestricted Rally Spaces

All groups, student or otherwise, would have open range to protest all day and all night. A 500-foot Justice For All tower depicting aborted fetuses and a 1,500-foot Campus Coalition for Peace and Justice tower depicting Iraqi war victims would obstruct the Tower. Anyone trying to get to the Main Building or the UGL will have to fight his or her way through throngs of foul smelling anti-Bush vegans chucking copies of the Socialist Worker and spray-painting anyone wearing GAP khakis.

Stop Printing Campus Maps

Getting around the 40 Acres is no easy task. Among the constant construction, idiots on bikes and buildings with 20 different names, it's amazing that anyone gets anywhere. Banning all campus maps will eliminate anyone who lacks the social or directional skills to find out where they are going. As a side benefit, geography majors, like myself, could make some extra dough by designing and selling our own contraband maps.

Let Campus and Community Involvement Handle the Application Process

Somehow, the CCI takes the simplest of tasks - such as booking a room - and turns it into an affair slightly more complicated than filing the taxes for a Fortune 500 corporation. If CCI was in charge you'd need 15 letters of recommendation, fill out 200 pages of forms, and hand more than $8. You would have to send and resend the application back and forth half a dozen times because you forget to dot an "i" or because they lost a form. When all that was done they'd probably just end up sending you to the wrong university anyways.

Move the business school to Vidor, Texas

They think they're better than a majority of the population, so why not send them to a place where they really might be? Everyone wants to get into the McCombs School of Business, but would it remain that popular if their students had to drive back and forth between here and Vidor in the 10 minutes allotted between classes?

Five-Year Ban on Students from Plano

If you're sitting in class, reading this instead of paying attention to the lecture, look around. See that kid in the green polo? He went to Plano. See that girl in the "Everybody is Somebody in Luckenbach" T-shirt? She's from Plano too. In fact, just about everyone you've ever met have been from Plano. I say we cut them off for five years. That should reduce enrollment to just the 25,000 students from Houston.

Obviously, my favorite was having YCT on the welcome committee. For those of you not familiar with UT, every year Justice For All, an anti-abortion organization gets the West Mall rally space for a week or so to erect their 20-foot high signs of aborted fetuses. And of course, we also have the ISO (International Socialist Organization), which is usually protesting something. Also, as a former club president, I can personally atest to the difficulty in getting anything accomplished at the CCI office. Yes, there's several really nice people that work there, but good god.... it took forever to get things throught their bureaucracy.

Posted by Byron LaMasters at February 10, 2004 04:11 PM | TrackBack