Rolling Admission - Keeps Seats Filled and Lowers Tuition

In 1972, I participated quite substantially in creating the paralegal field, by opening up a paralegal school for graduates of any of the thousands of colleges (not just graduates from the Seven Sisters colleges). My school started out as most schools do, with a limited number of class entry points per year.

It wasn't long before I changed this and allowed new students to enter 50 weeks each year. This meant that whenever somebody dropped out, I could replace that student and keep the 30 seats occupied, unlike colleges and universities, which have vacant seats starting a week or so after a semester begins.

When all seats have paying students, the cost per student is less. The $2,000 in tuition I mention for my concept of a local unlicensed Equivalency College is based upon Rolling Admission (as I have created and used that term in this way since about 1973).

Rolling Admission is a major marketing tool that enables schools with Rolling Admission to compete very effectively with schools not using Rolling Admission. This advantage of having a higher percentage of tuition-paying classroom seats enables the using school to obtain and retain better instructors, which makes the competition even more difficult for the non-using schools.

The way they dealt with this competition is through excessive regulation of the better, using schools, to put them out of business, so that the inferior schools (often financed with taxpayer money) would survive with lower taxpayer financing, at the cost of putting the better schools out of business.

Anyway, not all curricula can use Rolling Admission.

The primary problem is that the curriculum should not have any prerequisite courses. If there are any prerequisite courses, they would have to be taught first, before a student could enter the rolling part of the course.

In paralegal instruction, it really made no difference whether a student took real estate prior to litigation or trusts and estates prior to legal research, for example.

Another main difference is that the student can take only one subject at a time, unlike a regular college in which a student might be taking 5-6 courses at the same time.

This creates problems for teachers, because the same teacher will be teaching 15 hours per week in a rolling course, whereas in a regular college an instructor teaching only one subject might teach as few as 2-3 hours per week.

Finally, for the 500-hour course teaching students how to be the Assistant to the Owner of a Small Business, there are so many (perhaps 500 to 1,000 different) topics in the course, ranging in length from several minutes to several hours, it is totally impossible to schedule various instructors. Instead, one small business person is required to teach the course as it rolls along, until someone else is retained to replace him/her. This is the most effective way to run the Assistant course. Any other way would be a scheduling nightmare with many gaps and considerable complaints (and possible withdrawals) by students.

Finding qualified businesspersons willing to make the commitment is a major activity for teaching the course, and I recommend that there be a qualified instructor on call to fill in when an instructor is unable to teach for any reason.

My Contact Information

Carl E. Person
225 E. 36th Street - Suite 3A
New York NY 10016-3664
Office : 212-307-4444
Fax : 212-307-0247

Email to : Email to Attorney Carl E. Person

Revision 3/27/19 2:57 am