August 9, 2005
Tifton- This will be the first year Georgia students will not have to take the SAT to attend a two-year college. The Board of Regents is hoping the change will boost enrollment numbers.
For now the campus of Abraham Baldwin College is relatively quiet, except for inside the meeting room at the ABAC Place town hall.
The group of students are in a week-long training to become community advisors for the hundreds of students who will be living on campus.
"ABAC Place is full. We're having to turn students away over there much to our regret," says interim president Tom Call.
The new apartment-style dorms are a definite draw, but ABAC has seen record enrollment numbers for the past five years.
"We have over 2,000 applications for new students this Fall which is way above anything we ever had. That doesn't break the record, it smashes the record, so we're looking for big things this Fall," Call says.
For the first time none of the students going to Georgia's two-year schools will have to take the SAT. Still, interim president Tom Call doesn't think it will force the state's colleges to exceed their capacity.
"I don't think this year we're going to see a big change. It's takes a while for these things to get filtered down into the high schools for people to know about them," he says.
It may not be required, but Call does not believe taking the SAT be a thing of the past.
"I think a lot of students will continue to take it. We get a lot of students who may consider several schools, and a lot of schools still do require the SAT, so we'll still get a lot of students with the SAT."
But, those students will no longer have to worry about whether their scores are high enough to get them into two-year schools like ABAC.
The SAT will still be used by many schools for placement in certain classes.
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