I am writing this letter in response to a letter from Dr. Roger J. Thompson (“Rise of admission standards good for IU,” Sept. 13). As an educator in disadvantaged communities, the older brother of a student recently denied admission to IU and an alumnus of Indiana University Bloomington, I can’t help but disagree with Dr. Thompson. \nIf I were to seek admittance to IU right now, rather than in 1998, I would most likely be denied, but my studies in Bloomington were very successful. I took a wide variety of classes at the undergraduate and graduate level as well as traveled overseas several times on grants from the Honors College. My SAT scores were weak, as were my younger sisters’, not because we were not well-read or capable intellectually, but because students from lower socio-economic backgrounds do not spend large amounts of money taking classes for the express purpose of doing well on standardized tests. She is a far better student now than I was when I gained admittance to IU-Bloomington, and I believe that the emphasis on increasing the “quality” of students at IUB for the most part only translates into taking more and more students from already highly advantaged communities. \nHigh-achieving students from my community, the east side of Indianapolis, used to be able to aspire to attend the Bloomington campus, but they are now being shifted off to lower-quality branch campuses in favor of out-of-state students and students from far more affluent backgrounds. The sprouting of “luxury apartments” in Bloomington can attest to that. IU is a state institution and should have a far more balanced representation of students from this state. When the majority of students walking the campus in Bloomington are less and less representative of the economic and social diversity of our state, and less and less students from our state are deemed to be of high enough “quality,” then we have lost a great deal.
Cameron Moser\nIU alumnus
