Are we sending too many unprepared/underprepared students to college?

Parents Forum
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1 thing that the article which somebody posted many posts ago touched upon was the thought process which some unprepared/underprepared students go through when they get a bad grade on a test or in a class. It’s the mind set of “Maybe I’m not good enough for this” or “Maybe I’m not cut out for this.”

Underprepared students kind of need a mentor to sort of guide them through those bumps in the road. EVERY student encounters bumps in the road. What can be different, though, between somebody who sticks it out and finishes college and somebody who throws in the towel is learning how to navigate through the bumps in the road that one is bound to encounter.

For example:
D24 struggled a lot in middle school & 9th grade in certain subjects. Would do the HW, but sometimes ‘forget’ to turn it in (happened a lot in english class in grades 7-8!). Needed extra help in math, but was afraid to go to student hours after school for 1-on-1 free help w/the teacher. Tried to cover it up from us parents, but of course eventually we found out. At the same time, in some subjects, she didn’t know yet how to study for a test…history, science, math tests. She thought that just reading over her notes was good enough, but was struggling test/quiz grades in those subjects.

Every time this would come up, she’d get upset, emotionally, and immediately start saying stuff like “Maybe I’m just too dumb for this” or “Maybe I don’t belong at this school” or “I’m so stupid.”

We spent MANY hours over grades 7-9 talking to her whenever this came up to remind her that:

  • she’s not dumb
  • she’s not stupid
  • she’s learning what does NOT work
  • what do you do when you learn that something you’re doing doesn’t produce the results you want? You do NOT do it that same way again and again. You try it a different way.
  • she needs to change her thought process from “I’m stupid” to “Ok, that didn’t work. I’m going to try it differently this next time.” And then keep repeating that until you figure out a study method that works for you.
  • you might as well figure this out now rather than later because eventually, this will come up in college, too, and you’ll need to know how to troubleshoot this sort of problem again down the road.

This is where, honestly, really big universities are probably going to be more of a struggle for underprepared students than smaller ones. I think that community colleges can fill the gap and help underprepared HS grads to become BETTER prepared before transferring to a 4-yr institution. However, at the same time, there’s a big elitist attitude against community colleges…as if starting out at a community college means that you’re some how “lesser” than everybody else.

And at the end of the day, hiring managers don’t give a rip that you started college at a community college.

In my family’s personal example above, an underprepared HS grad might never have run into that situation yet. And when you add in maybe parents who are unfamiliar with how the college process works, that can make it harder. Add in also maybe thought processes in the kid’s head of “Everybody else has it all figured out and I’m really struggling. I don’t want to look stupid by asking a bunch of questions, so I’ll just sit here and suffer and be miserable. Maybe I should just drop out and move back home and get a job. I must not be good enough for college.”

If you are the kid for whom learning is like living on Easy Street, that’s great. For the majority of students, though, this is not the case. What IS different, though, between prepared students & unprepared college students is, in my opinion, the development of that…I don’t know how to put it…mental toughness, grit, an attitude of “Ok, this is a big problem, but I’m going to figure this out. I’m going to go ask for a bunch of help and figure out how to eat the elephant one bite at a time.”

For example:

  • Getting bad grades and not going to class? Maybe start by going to every class from here on out.
  • go to professors’ office hours
  • find out where the on campus tutoring center is. Ask for help there.
  • get out of your comfort zone and talk to people sitting next to you in class. Invite them to join a study group with you.
  • go to a study skills workshop at your school. Every tutoring/counseling center usually has those.
  • take care of yourself. Get more sleep. Stop partying so much.
  • do the HW.
  • read the assigned readings each week.
  • don’t wait until the night before to study for a test.
  • don’t wait until the night before to start writing that big 10-page paper that’s due tomorrow.
  • don’t wait until finals week to go to the professor asking for help in how to bring your grade up from an F to a C.
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Apparently, at least one poster here has claimed that their employer rejects those who started at community college before finishing a BA/BS at a university. So apparently there is some elitism against community colleges out there.

Elitism against community colleges is also reputed to exist among medical schools.

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I have not observed elitism by employers re: Community College.

However- CC is not a silver bullet. I know kids in my neighborhood who are commuting to the local CC- and most of them intend to go on for a four year degree. BUT-- and this is not a minor but- if they are first gen college, their parents assume that CC is like 13th grade and it is not.

So college kid expected to attend EVERY family gathering (nephew’s third birthday! Cousin’s baby shower! Great Uncle Ned’s retirement BBQ! how can you miss those milestones?) regardless of whether the kid has an exam the next day, or a paper due that Wednesday, or is even just behind and needs to study. This is a problem.

College kid expected to pick up the slack with younger siblings because “He’s only in class 8 hours a week, what the heck is he doing with the rest of his day?” Well, he should be attending the review sessions we’re all writing about, or meeting with professors, or having a regularly scheduled two hour block at the writing center to learn how to structure a paper, AND labs, the sessions where the much maligned adjuncts and TA’s show kids how to write a lab report… Etc. None of that is happening if the CC first gen student (who may have been a solid student in HS but needs support) is living his or her HS life with family commitments and picking up siblings at school and going with grandma to the doctor to translate.

And of course- working a job.

So let’s not pretend that siphoning every “not quite prepared for a four year degree but college material” kid off to CC is a silver bullet. Because it’s not.

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Fair point. But just because a couple of people’s employers do it doesn’t mean it happens everywhere.

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@blossom This is the sort of stuff I was referring to above where families are familiar with what it takes to get through college vs those who don’t get it yet. Very good examples.

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Yes- familiar with AND understanding that a college kid cannot live their HS life even if they are still living at home, eating dinner with the family most nights. I always cross my fingers when I see a good kid really blowing the cover off the ball in CC because our flagship state U is NOT within commuting distance of my city. (There is a branch of the state U system whose campus is walking distance from my neighborhood- AND a bus). But the really motivated CC kid who can make it into the flagship will have two years of living away from home.

I don’t romanticize that experience- dorm living is not for everyone. But it does normalize studying past dinner, going to review sessions, waiting after lecture to talk to the professor, AND… using the career services center!!! Important for a kid whose parents did not go to college to understand what an internship is, why you can’t wait until after graduation to look for a job (except in some fields where that’s how it’s done). Even what seems obvious to people who have been to college- being certified in early childhood Ed will not get you a job teaching HS chemistry… for many folks who did not go to college, if you’re an education major, you get a job teaching. And since the local newspapers write about how much HS science teachers are getting paid right now-- it’s natural to assume “teachers are making bank”.

So much social capital that first Gen kids need…

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Yes, but I think the broader point is that there is no silver bullet, period.

Those social issues (for lack of a better term) still exist if one goes to a 4-year college. In fact, many kids who attend Cal State campuses live at home and the social stuff remains. Or if they live on campus, they still get a job to send money home.

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“Cheap" is not the same thing as cost effective. The Texas programs have drastically improved the four year and longer term graduation rates. Many more students are graduating every year. This means that the school is no longer “throwing money at” (to quote @1NJParent) the drop outs.

Is this your guess, or is do you have a source for the assertion? If the latter, can you provide a link?

Specifically, how much do the current programs cost as compared to the previous approach the university was taking regarding struggling students? What is the savings from not “throwing money at” students who would never graduate? How does the added expense compare to the benefits (financial and otherwise) of drastically cutting the drop out rate, and graduating many more students, many of who were previously low income?

Is this your guess, or is do you have a source for the assertion? If the latter, can you provide a link?

Specifically, how much do the current programs cost as compared to the previous approach the university was taking regarding struggling students? What is the savings from not “throwing money at” students who would never graduate? How does the added expense (if any) compare to the benefits (financial and otherwise) of drastically cutting the drop out rate, and graduating more students, many of who were previously low income?

As @StPaulDad pointed out, it doesn’t necessarily cost a lot to address some of the issues that hold these students back, and when one considers the benefit of such programs, there appears to be a tremendous return on investment.

UT had other options. It had been trying to address the issue by funneling these students into remedial tracks. This more traditional approach not only failed, it was actually counterproductive. From the article . . .

The default strategy at U.T. for dealing with failing students was to funnel them into remedial programs — precalculus instead of calculus; chemistry for English majors instead of chemistry for science majors. “This, to me, was just the worst thing you could possibly imagine doing,” Laude said. “It was saying, ‘Hey, you don’t even belong.’ And when you looked at the data to see what happened to the kids who were put into precalculus or into nonmajors chemistry, they never stayed in the college. And no wonder. They were outsiders from the beginning.”

Though a failure, this remedial approach must have cost money, too. How does the current approach compare, efficiency-wise, to this previous default approach?

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Of course, the cost of drop-outs isnt borne by the University, but by the rest of society. Drop-outs do have some effect on a school’s ranking, but not enough. I am glad as a public U that UT has this program, but recognize that the school itself doesnt suffer much when kids drop out-there are plenty to replace them, and tuition is so low it doesnt matter much anyway. So asking it to calculate its direct costs in funding this program ( teachers, social workers, etc) versus the indirect benefit to society of having more grads and fewer dropouts is futile.

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To the contrary, the cost is borne by the University and the rest of society.

As you have repeatedly written throughout this thread, remedial tracks cost a lot of money and resources. If such efforts are not producing the desired impact (education and graduation) then such expenditures are not cost effective! Hasn’t that been the underlying the premise of many posters throughout the thread?

Add to this the societal costs, and one can better understand the relative cost effectiveness of a program that better educates and graduates a much higher percentage of students.

I thought UT’s mission was, among other things, educating and graduating its students for the benefit of the students, Texas, and beyond. If so, then doing so effectively and efficiently should be of primary concern, and such calculations should be a necessity.

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UT has a highly successful program now in its second decade. Why do you think every public university in the country has not followed suit? Drop outs are not unique to Texas, and this program has been well known nationwide since at least 2017. Hmm, maybe cost?

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I would not conclude cost without evidence of that.

There are lots of OTHER reasons that other public universities haven’t followed suit. For one thing, the Texas admissions program is unique (if there is another one in the country that has the same cut-off system, then please educate me). So the probability that within that auto-admit pool you’ve got kids with strong grades at sub-par high schools is pretty high. In other states, just having a high class rank won’t get you in to the flagship. Hence, fewer “unprepared” kids in the population.

Do you think Rhode Island- where every HS kid in the state is at most an hour drive from the flagship U struggles with access to higher ed in the same way that Texas does?

Political pressure- do you think that Wyoming or one of the states where the biggest problem is a declining population of college aged kids-- is devoting the brain space to drop outs? No- it is consolidating programs, looking to see how to collapse its infrastructure based on demographic predictions.

Etc, I wouldn’t conclude that the issue is cost without evidence to support that assumption.

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If we now talk about the cost, to individuals and the society, we have to bear in mind a few other costs as well. Even if we manage to graduate a few more students from college, are we really doing all of them a favor if some of them can’t find good jobs worthy of their college degrees? Some of them may have to take on debt for their degrees and we all have heard or read about stories that they couldn’t find jobs paid well enough to service their debt, or live a middle-class life? Do their degrees actually keep them from doing jobs that they would otherwise take that could lead them to a better life?

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We are likely to see more of the UT style admissions in the future, given the likely court rulings

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I wonder what UNC Chapel Hill had been doing differently from UT Austin? According to their Common Data Set UNC’s current graduation numbers are way higher than the 70% goal UT Austin had at the time of The NY Times article. UNC reports the 2015 cohort (section B of the CDS) had 4 year grad rate at 85% and a 6 yr grad rate of 91.9%. UNC admits from all over NC and has a goal of reaching high schools all across the state. The 4 year grad rate for Pell Grant recipients for that 2015 cohort was 80% and the 6 yr grad rate was 89%.

Looks like UT did achieve their goal. Their current CDS stats are in line with UNC’s, too. Interactive Common Data Set | Institutional Reporting, Research, and Information Systems (IRRIS)

I checked some of the other UNC system schools and as noted in The NY Times article the less selective schools have lower 4 and 6 year grad rates. I wonder if part of it is peer pressure. The kids at UNC Chapel Hill see their peers sticking it out and getting through to graduation, but the kids at less selective schools might see more kids dropping out and then they see that as a viable option. Kind of a contagion theory.

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More obvious reasons:

  • Less selective schools have more academically unprepared students.
  • Less selective schools commonly have more financially unprepared students (low SES, less money, less financial aid at many less selective schools). More selective schools often tout their generous financial aid, but many of them admit few students from low SES backgrounds.
  • Less selective schools commonly have more socially unprepared students (as mentioned above with first-generation-to-college students).
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I’m not sure how different that is across the UNC system. I guess I could do a deep dive on Pell Grant recipients.

The real reason for my post, though, was I’m not sure what UNC was doing differently at the time of The NY Times article. They seem to have evened out now, but per the NYT article ColdWombat posted, Texas’s grad rate was way below UNC’s and UVA’s and Michigan’s. UNC seems like a pretty similar school to Texas with more than 80% of kids coming from in-state.

FTR, w/ regard to financially challenged students, in the 2015 cohort in section B of the Common Data Sets for Texas and UNC, Texas had 24% Pell Grant recipients and UNC had 21% Pell Grant recipients. UNC had 34% of the 2015 cohort receiving either a Pell grant or a Stafford loan or both. Texas had 35%. So they were not that far apart.

What was UNC doing that Texas was not? I know they have some pretty good programs like the Carolina Covenant, but I’m not sure if they were doing that in 2014 or not. Seems like it would have been good to know what the peer institutions that were succeeding were doing right, but the NYT article doesn’t seem to touch on that.

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I don’t know how many have (or will) follow suit. Do you? If not, I don’t think it makes sense to just assume that other schools addressing similar issues haven’t (or won’t) follow suit. And for reasons described by @blossom (and more reasons) it makes even less sense to further assume that, if this happens, it will be because of cost.

Low SES kids with college degrees are much more likely to escape poverty than those without college degrees. While I would never term providing a quality education as “doing them a favor,” the students benefit, their future and current families benefit, and society benefits.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems you are now suggesting that there is a certain segment of society that doesn’t belong in college even if adequately qualified academically to graduate, and that society would be “doing them a favor” by keeping them out.

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I don’t segment society, but perhaps you do? If a student is unprepared academically or mentally, it doesn’t matter what types of family background s/he comes from. As we’ve seen, graduation doesn’t guarantee a good job. It’s such a low bar.

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Are there some individuals (no matter their background) who don’t belong in college even if they are adequately qualified academically and mentally to complete the requirements to graduate?

In other words, do you believe it is currently too easy to gain admission to and graduate from college?

Would we be “doing them a favor” by keeping more people out based on some heightened standard of preparedness?