CUNY Disputes Magazine’s Account of Minority Students’ Admissions Hurdles

The City University of New York has some serious bones to pick with an article in The Atlantic magazine that initially billed itself as an exposé of the difficulties minority students face in getting into the system’s colleges.

For example, the original text of the article (it has since been changed) said many applicants found themselves “locked out of the City University of New York,” according to the system’s written response to the article. The response, a letter written by the system’s senior vice chancellor for university relations, Jay Hershenson, pointed out that all the students cited in the article as examples had been accepted by a CUNY institution.

The magazine has since made a number of corrections to the article, which was titled “When Being a Valedictorian Isn’t Enough.” They are outlined in a note at the bottom of the article:

CUNY’s letter takes issue with the article’s first anecdote, a student named Kenneth Rosario whom the article quotes as saying he had been denied admission to “the top CUNY schools.” Mr. Hershenson states in the letter that Mr. Rosario was admitted to his first four choices at CUNY but declined to enroll, which neither the article nor the addendum mentions.

The brouhaha has echoes of a now-infamous article in Rolling Stone, published last year, that told the story of an unnamed University of Virginia student who said she had been gang-raped at a fraternity house. The magazine’s account has since been discredited by news-media scrutiny.