Back in 2000, the U.S. Department of Education reported, 28 percent of entering freshmen showed up deficient in reading, writing, or math. Many observers found the numbers cause for dismay. How did the kids make it to college without learning paragraph structure or intermediate algebra? How many millions of dollars did those classes cost? A 2006 issue brief by the Alliance for Excellent Education (go here and scroll down to “Paying Double: Inadequate High Schools and Community College Remediation”) estimated the expense at $3.7-billion per year.
Recent reports, however, make the old numbers look almost positive. In 2005, only 51 percent of kids who took the ACT test reached “college readiness benchmarks.” (See here). Also in 2005, according to this story, “Nearly one-third of Colorado high-school graduates who enrolled in public in-state colleges last year needed remedial classes in math, writing or reading.”
In Fall 2007, according to this story, “37 percent of freshmen entered a California State University campus last fall needing remedial math, while 46 percent were unprepared for college-level English.”
Finally, a report last month by the Massachusetts Department of Education found that “among public high-school graduates, 37 percent enrolled in at least one developmental (remedial) course in their first semester in college.”
Professors in liberal-arts courses who spend no time with first-year students need to set new priorities. You can’t build advanced humanistic study on thin foundations of reading and writing. We need more full professors in freshman classes, more focus on general education in the humanities, and less tenured-prof flight into graduate seminars and special-topic senior courses.
