ABSTRACT
One of the tasks to which the City University of New York as a whole, and each of its colleges as semiautonomous bodies, had to turn was a practical definition of what each of us meant the Open Admissions policy to stand for. As a university-wide policy, it became a measure of access to higher education, accomplished by overhauling admissions requirements throughout the system. The university agreed to allocate the resources necessary to mount an extensive and intensive remedial effort to bring the underprepared students up to the point where they could handle college-level work. Open Admissions touched the whole college in one way or another and made all of us rethink what we had been doing and where the college should be heading in the future. The college response to Open Admissions, although necessarily immediate when the policy was so hastily adopted in 1970, has nonetheless been developmental.
