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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Bob Zemsky

Investment in Improved Learning

For too long, discussion of access to higher education has been dominated by a belief that what is required is more public money for student aid. The problem is that we have been there, doing that for a quarter of a century with at best uncertain results.

Despite massive infusions of federal student aid which have clearly helped increase higher education participation rates, what has not increased is the proportion of those who start and then succeed in their studies. My conclusion? In the long term, college success rates will not improve until middle and high schools prove more adept at getting students ready for college. My preference, then, is to spend more money, not on financial aid, but on improved K-12 schooling.

Even if my preference was made policy tomorrow, it would take a decade of sustained effort to improve the college success rate unless something was also done to improve retention rates for those students who are now entering college unprepared to do college-level work. What needs to be improved, both quickly and dramatically, is what today passes for remedial instruction for lower division students who cannot pass the basic placement tests in math and English.

Hence the importance of the news last week from Kingsborough Community College in New York. A multi-year experiment, in which random samples of students requiring remediation were taught in learning communities, reported a substantial increase in the rate at which these students passed their remedial courses and then advanced to college-level work. What is important here is not the specific intervention—Kingsborough’s learning communities were small cohorts of students who took all their remedial courses together—but rather the fact that direct investment in an alternative learning strategy produced replicable results. Could it be that more money spent developing and testing alternative learning strategies might prove a better investment than more money for financial aid? It’s a question worth asking.

Posted at 08:19:48 AM on March 17, 2008 | All postings by bzemsky

Comments

  1. Some more details on the Kingsborough program, along with analytical commentary from a number of readers, is available at Inside Higher Ed:

    http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/11/learning

    — R.J. O'Hara · Mar 17, 06:07 PM · #

  2. From the end of WWII to the early 1980’s, with the help of the GI Bill and President Johnson’s Economic Opportunity Act—which was a central part of his War on Poverty programs like Head Start—and the burgeoning National Defense Student Loan Program, the number of first-generation college graduates increased dramatically. The conservative political movement of the 1970’s—largely built upon the economic downturns of that same period which sparked wide-spread insecurity and fear-based politics—came to power and was controlled by the Reagan political machine. Over the next 25 years, Reagan era public officials and like-minded fiscal conservatives—which include the Clinton and the two Bush administrations—eroded the amount, access and cost of financial aid to students of poor and average means. Bob Zensky’s essay does not acknowledge this fact or its devastating consequences to enrollments and graduation rates from 4-year degree programs. Also, any illusion that remediation to improve standardized test scores will improve the quality of the educational experience for low and middle income students—and their future chances of graduating from college—ignores the fact that when NCLB was passed and those ‘accountability’ tests were instituted, the funding that was supposed to accompany “standards” in order to improve instruction was not passed. How does Mr. Zensky imagine that K-12 remediation to help students meet the federal and state standards be funded and implemented if the original standards and mandates were not? And, how does he imagine that such a remediation movement could be any more successful without additional funding? The bottom line is that we need both; we need to return to a national commitment to subsidize financial aid for young people who want and need a college education to compete in the global economy and become active, effective democratic citizens. And, we need to invest in remediation for students struggling in underfunded schools and deteriorating neighborhoods, if we want America to get back on track of always improving the next generation’s chances at success and a better democracy.

    — Jerilyn Fay Kelle, Ph.D. · Mar 18, 03:16 PM · #

  3. The United States of America, and the elites who run it, do not want between 1/6th and 1/3 of the entire population of their country to consume resources for having parents, health, and schooling. How can elites be rich if they are dragged down by all sorts of poor and unfortunate people without parents, health, and education. What is the point of having elites if they get thusly dragged down? Funding is missing for this 1/6th to 1/3 because elites in the US are innovative, flamboyant, ostentatiously rich—they cannot do a good job of all of that weighed down with responsibiltiy for the entire population of their nation can they? Be reasonable. Look what happened in Europe when elites allowed themselves to be encumbered with caring for their ENTIRE populations—the longeivity rate of the elites themselves shot past the longeivity of American elites!!!!!!!

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Mar 24, 09:28 AM · #

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