Open Admissions as Openness-Valuing, Testing Whether Institutions Create or Merely Reflect, Quality of Population

Institutions which prior to adopting open admissions, were known for high levels of achievement, invariably fell back to the level of the quality of population within them, even though being otherwise still the same institutions. New York City colleges and certain high schools are prime examples of this effect, so much so that,the reversal of the downslide has been shown as well, when standards of admission were raised afterwards, the institutions in several cases came back into their own. Erasmus High school in Brooklyn with local zone students throughout, went from graduating several future Nobel prizewinners per year, within a decade or so, to the low and criminal end of quality of population, even though all the other parts of the institution such as buildings and staff changed little if at all during the main changeover. Nothing but the all-importance of quality of population, and the negligible importance of institutional characteristics net of quality of population changes, can explain this.