Today, I was filled with gratitude to read that the FSM Congress appropriated $2,000,000 for scholarships. But my gratitude quickly turned into despair when I learned that FSM college students need to achieve a 3.0 GPA to qualify for this financial assistance from their country.
I would venture to believe that the FSM Congress has just eliminated about 99% of FSMers in undergraduate studies in 4-years institutions from qualifying for much needed scholarship by requiring them to have a 3.0 GPA. Why?
Why 3.0 GPA? Why not 4.0? Or 2.72? What research data did these politicians use to determine the academic level of qualification for this scholarship? Is 3.0 a good predictor of a future successful FSMer in the workplace? Do they know how hard it is for any non-English speaking student in a US-based undergraduate institution to achieve and maintain a 3.0 GPA? Do they know that many FSM college students are products of bad public educational systems…elementary and secondary…which makes it doubly difficult for them to reach and maintain a 3.0 GPA? Even English speakers have a tough time to reach a 3.0 GPA.
I want to know how many of those congressmen graduated from college… with a 3.0 GPA. Don’t get me wrong, academic qualification is necessary, but it can’t be just an arbitrary number based on some arbitrary measure of success. What is a successful college graduate anyway? When was the last time a job application in the FSM or anywhere in the US asks for a college GPA to measure the likelihood of a job applicant’s success in the job? Since when have we as a nation used 3.0 GPA as the measure of a successful citizen in the FSM work force? I would think our country is led by college graduates. Not necessarily college graduates with 3.0 GPA, but simply college graduates. So why are we making it difficult for our future college graduates to even stay in college due to financial stress?
My point is that any FSMer who graduates with a diploma from any 4-year institution is a successful college graduate with a degree, period. Most institutions of higher education will award a bachelor’s degree to students as long as they are in “good standing” and that often means academic, disciplinary, and financial standing. Academic usually means the student is not on probation (usually nothing below 2.0). No employer in the FSM cares that a college graduate finished with a 2.0, 3.0, or 4.0 GPA.
What the FSM Congress is doing by requiring a 3.0 is making it extremely hard for FSMers in good 4-year institutions to even get the financial help they need to graduate from those institutions. They simply have made it easier for students in the country’s community colleges to qualify for that funding because the workload and grading systems aren’t as rigorous as the 4-year institutions. Teachers in the community college teach to the level of competencies of students who graduate from the myriad of bad public and private high schools in the FSM. Many of these COM graduates struggle at 4-year institution where faculty members aren’t holding their hands through rigorous academic work. That’s when a 3.0 GPA becomes extremely difficult to achieve.
I work with Micronesian students at a 4-year institution who are struggling financially to stay in school. They don’t need a 3.0 incentive to make them want to graduate from college. They are already in college for heaven’s sake. But the FSM Congress has made the decision to become part of the elitist movement who are financing the top 1 percent of college students from the FSM. Ironically, the FSM Congress is probably run by the 99% college graduates who did not graduate with a 3.0 GPA. God forbid that some of them may even be high school or college drop outs.
I guess my point of contention with the FSM Congress’ requirement of a 3.0 GPA for FSMers is that it closes the door to so many students in 4-year institutions to qualify for the funds. Yet, those students IF they make it through college will return to FSM and run the nation and be very successful at it. It makes me wonder why FSM Congress has chosen to close the door to a college education prematurely if the nation is not requiring a 3.0 college GPA to be a member of congress, governor, president, school principal, teacher, economist, etc. Leave it to the damn politicians to enact pointless laws that fail to empower the youth of our nation.
