Today, some 800 provisional students will begin their college careers at our campus. The University will cash their tuition & housing checks, place them in 12 hours of large, uninspiring classes, and expect them to earn a 2.25 GPA.

By August, nearly half of them will be gone.

Some fail, some quit, and some make the cut but are so disgusted with the University that they choose to enroll elsewhere.

Perhaps this is because our support services for these students are grossly inadequate. Maybe it's because provisional students have no control over which classes and professors they take. It could be their student-faculty ratio: 100-to-1 in most classes, poor even by UT standards.

And of course, some provisional students simply can't make it in our academic environment.
Most provisional students arrive in Austin a few days after their high school graduation. Aside from the normal difficulties and distractions of beginning college life, their performance in the program could drastically affect their future. Get a 2.25 and enroll in UT business school; get a 2.24 and say hello to Longview community college.

So what does the University do to help these students succeed? Not nearly enough.
Administrators assign 31 academic advisors to these 800 students. These advisors, however, are burdened with the needs of their own departments and students. Office visits are rare, since provisional students are in class from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day.

The Learning Skills Center offers a number of resources to provisional students, such as individualized tutoring - for a price. If you're willing to pay $8.75 an hour, these services are yours. To their credit, the LSC has expended a few of the free review sessions offered to provisional students and offers some tutoring fee waivers, but a structured tutorial program for provisional students is markedly absent.

Students with $995 can enroll in a comprehensive tutoring program at the House of Tutors, just off campus. For this fee, students get around-the-clock mentoring, up to 14 hours of tutoring per week, and endless resources topped off with a money back guarantee.

Sure, it's a little pricey (to say the least), but House of Tutors boasts a 90 percent success rate for the students who enroll in their program. It just goes to show what some personalized attention can do for a freshman.

The University will never be able to offer services comparable to a private tutoring service, nor should this be the expectation. Certainly, though, there is room for improvement.

Officials defend the program, saying that its goal is not to have a 100 percent success rate. Some students, they say, simply aren't Longhorn material. The program aims to give a realistic picture of the academic expectations at UT and find out if the student can cut it.

Perhaps they're right. But a failure rate of 30 percent to 50 percent per year can't be blamed solely on the students in the program. We can do better - after all, we are talking about a student's future.

Individualized attention and stronger mentoring should be the hallmark of the provisional program, not the anomaly. Even before provisional students arrive on campus, their courses have been chosen for them, their professors assigned. No on stopped to talk to them, no one seems to care. They are given the name of an advisor they don't have time to see and are shuttled into classes with 100 other people.

An outsider might say that it seems that the University doesn't even want these students. A more realistic explanation is one which permeates much of UT bureaucracy: there's just not enough money and even less space.

Preliminary indications seem to show that UT's enrollment could be increasing yet again in the fall - last year's applicant crop was 4,000 students larger than the year before. We're the largest university in the nation, and we're getting bigger.

In a situation like this, it's easy to see why so many provisional students feel as if the University could care less if they failed out. After all, it's one less mouth to feed, so to speak. Administrators need to make a choice: Is this a program designed to help students or weed them out? From an exterior perspective, the latter intention certainly eclipses the former.

Rob Addy
THE DAILY TEXAN, June 3, 1999