Somehow this thread lingered in limbo, and I woke up to find it this morning while I was having my first coffee. I didn't remember I originally posted it. Talk about a blast from the past.
I could have gone to City College of New York(CCNY) in 1969, but I chose to join the Army. At the time CCNY had free tuition, but they accepted students on a competitve basis only. CCNY at that time was second only to Harvard in producing Nobel Prizes.
The big demand at CCNY from the left at the time was for "Open Admissions", i.e. take almost any student who wanted to go there, even if they needed remedial education. Eventually, I'm not sure exactly when, the City University administration finally acceded and began "Open Admissions" in all the four year colleges of the university, although the real demand for the new policy was for the more reputable colleges, e.g. City, Hunter and Queens, IIRC.
I started at CCNY in 1972 mainly because it had a good Science Department and was only about three miles from where I grew up in northern Manhattan. Free tuition ended about 3.5 years later, and the school lost its reputation for academic excellence. Only recent years have seen attempts to restore the reputation of CCNY.
What the left hath wrought.