Only about half of this year's high school graduates have the reading skills they need to succeed in college, and even fewer are prepared for college-level science and math courses, according to a yearly report from ACT, which produces one of the nation's leading college admissions tests.
The result?
"It is very likely that hundreds of thousands of students will have a disconnect between their plans for college and the cold reality of their readiness for college," Richard L. Ferguson, chief executive of ACT, said in an online news conference yesterday. Read the rest.
This isn't shocking at all to me, as a good share of the students I teach each year demonstrate that lack of language skills. I find myself asking time after time each semester how someone can pass through 10+ years of schooling in a country that practically worships education and not be able to write a coherent paragraph, summarize the main point of a reading, or compare the ideas of different writers. Seriously: asked to compare articles in The Nation and the National Review, some pupils of mine came to the conclusion that both were political, that the NR probably was written for Democrats,and the readers of The Nation would probably vote for President Bush. Driving home some nights, I think I ought to quit teaching and sell real estate, where you can turn people's ignorance to your advantage.
There are all sorts of things you can blame this on, but the thing that really stuck out to me in this article was the number of students arriving at college without key preparatory courses under their belts. This suggests the problem is not poor teaching or other shortcomings in the education system (although there are plenty of those), but that students have, for whatever reason, not even attempted the work that would prepare them for college courses. That isn't news to me. I have a lingering confusion why this is allowed to happen. This is a problem requiring no drastic curricular overhaul to fix--students just need to take on the more challenging parts of the curricula that exist. And parents, couselors, and future employers need to encourage them to do it.
This won't be easy, and it's not a cure-all for the problems many new students have in college. But it's a solution close at hand, and doable with existing resources. I have a personal stake in this, I'll admit. I'd rather spend class time teaching students what they need to know for college writing instead of what they should know when they get there. But I think the students have an even bigger stake. I deal with them for a semester; they carry their writing abilities into the rest of their classes and into their future work, and thrive or suffer accordingly. When they suffer, the consequences may not be easily shrugged off.
I teach at an open-admissions university. Anyone with a high school diploma is welcome to give higher education a try. There's a democratic aspect to that that I like, but it also means some will be admitted who aren't up to the challenge. There is a group of students numbering in the hundreds on my campus known as "academic boat people." Once admitted, they pass their general ed courses with grades high enough to stay in school, but not high enough to gain admission to a major field of study or a preprofessional program. (Most majors on my campus require a minimum GPA from students applying to them--you don't simply go to an advisor and say you want to major in X---, the way I did.) So if they don't want to drop out, they just keep taking electives or retaking core courses in often-frustrated hopes of attaing the grades that will let them move on. And many do keep pushing the rock up the hill, racking up more student loan debt along the way. A student could spend years at the university without getting on track to a degree. That's unfair to them, and suggests that the open admissions policy is, at best, a gesture of misplaced charity.
Still, I don't know that I'd get rid of it. The university does a lot, via mentoring and tutoring programs, as well as in orientation sessions, to help students stay in school and progress toward a degree. But I think the work most vital to retention and success has to happen before students get to college. They need to acquire the intellectual equipment required to navigate postsecondary coursework--or at least have an inkling of what that equipment is. So continue to admit all who have a diploma, but require that in obtaining that diploma they take challenging science and language courses. Doing that will make life harder for high school students, and perhaps especially hard for adult learners in GED programs, who often have more challenges and few supportive resources than traditional high school students do. But it will also spare them the frustrating and expensive experience of that "disconnect" between their dreams and their abilities.
Education is something it doesn't make sense to do halfway. Perhaps even more so on the institutional and social levels than on the personal level, a little learning truly is a dangerous thing.
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