Since that includes those who go to community college, do you propose that community colleges become selective and only allow enrollment by those meeting some high school GPA or similar academic readiness standard?
Community college expects to provide remedial education. The question is why 4 year universities need to do so. That is one very expensive and inefficient way of addressing a failure to acquire basic skills. The staff at universities were not, for the most part, hired for or particularly competent in, remedial education.
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What would you recommend that four year colleges set as the minimum academic readiness standard for admission?
Note that even highly selective colleges like Princeton offer remedial courses like MAT 100.
I realize that, and I suggest that is not a wise use of either party’s resources
That is a good question. I think we talked about his on some other thread, but UT Austin has spent millions upon millions of dollars on their remedial education offerings as the top 6% auto-admit rule ensures they have many non-college ready students attending every year.
I don’t know all the reasoning for continuing with the auto-admit policy, but expect UT believes they are in a position to help those students build on their academic skills and ultimately graduate college. As you said, it is an expensive and inefficient way to do this.
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I don’t see MAT100 as remedial per se. It is more of an equalizer Advanced precalc class for those high schools where the math was so bad that a good score on AP Calc BC is a 2 (or where Calc is not offered at all…)
To me, a remedial course is basic HS stuff: what we used to call Bonehead English back in the day, Alg II…These are the courses that many – most on some campuses – Cal State students have to take to move on. In essence, they start on the 5-year plan.
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The auto-admit rule was established as a backdoor way of establishing racial and ethnic diversity at UT, without an explicit affirmative action program. It will be interesting to see what happens next year after more court rulings. Most faculty would prefer the school was able to choose its own students
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This is the truth. Seems like every large public uni here in NC has summer “ease in” programs for kids. Not every kid is ready to go to college at 18. Over 50% of our population cannot read at grade level, forget about math. What would one expect based on these numbers?
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Short answer to the question in the thread title: Yes.
Why? It depends.
- some kids are academically ready for a 4 yr college, but not emotionally ready.
- some are academically ready for college, but they party way too much, develop some bad habits, end up on academic probation, etc. as a result.
- some students have psychological challenges which require additional assistance/support than the college community is able to provide and/or the local mental health services in the area are able to provide (i.e., you need a therapist and/or psychiatrist, but there’s a 6 month waiting list for a new patient appointment).
- some students are academically ready, but financially don’t know what the heck they are doing and their parents never taught them anything about how to handle personal finances, budgeting, how to make wise financial decisions, so they crash and burn financially.
- some students think they’re prepared because they got straight A’s in HS, but there’s a big difference from attending a class w/~30 kids to attending a class w/400 students…and where the professor doesn’t really care if you pass or fail, nobody’s going to check on you and call you and call your Mom & Dad if you decide to skip class all the time, never do the HW, never study for the tests or quizzes, etc.
- some students are academically prepared, but their parents have created such a large bubble around them their entire lives that the kid has never truly faced big consequences for screwing up & making bad decisions, so they go into the college experience expecting everything to be like living on Easy Street.
- some students go to a 4 yr college because their parents forced them to, but the kid’s heart really isn’t in it. Kid doesn’t know what he/she wants to do with his/her life yet, is tired of going to school, just wants to work, can’t afford to live on his/her own, but Mom & Dad won’t fund his/her lifestyle unless he/she is attending college.
- some students can academically hack it in college, but they have to pay for it all themselves. There’s no Bank of Mom & Dad. So they go through stops & starts and it takes longer than 4 years.
- Underprivileged students have a pretty big uphill climb on a lot of fronts, and all of that can hinder those students’ progress.
- And we should talk about the big elephant in the room that we all know as COVID and what a train wreck that was for MANY HS students’ learning progress for 2 years.
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However, it actually is remediating deficient high school preparation, since Princeton expects students to have taken four years of high school math (which means reaching a minimum of precalculus for college-prep students). I.e. MAT 100 is a remedial course for those who did not learn precalculus well enough when they took it in high school.
What minimum admission requirements would you want CSU to add so that no entering CSU students will need remedial English or math courses?
NAEP used to assess students in various grades about their proficiency in math and English. I recall for 12th graders, only about a quarter of them were deemed proficient in math, and even lower percentage in English. The rest, then, by definition, weren’t quite ready for college. These numbers probably haven’t changed much since those assessments were made.
There’re obviously different levels of “preparedness” necessary for different colleges and for different majors, but even if one excludes all students attending community colleges (which I’m not sure makes complete sense since some of them do go on to 4-year colleges), there’re still too many students in 4-year colleges with inadequate preparation.
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I agree the faculty might prefer the school admit the class differently.
It will be interesting what happens next year with these two affirmative action case decisions, the consequences could run very deep and in ways we don’t yet foresee.
Assuming affirmative action is not allowed going forward, I was thinking that colleges could just rely more on the various college access organizations that tend to work with minorities and/or FGLI students. Questbridge, Posse, College Possible, ScholarMatch and similar orgs work with tens of thousands of these types of students, BUT, if affirmative action in college admissions is not legal, I am not sure a college access organization will be able to use race in their admission criteria (which many do).
WSJ had an article the other day about the ways colleges might diversify their applicant pools: here: WSJ - admission strategies
I think some of the posts here are conflating two different populations- kids graduating from sub-par high schools who may have some holes in their background (HS only went to trig, only two years of foreign language, no chem lab) who otherwise show enormous intellectual curiosity and have excelled given the opportunities they’ve been given… and kids who have close to zero interest in academics of any kind AND may have holes in their background.
The most astonishing applicant I ever interviewed for Brown was in the first bucket- rural midwestern town, most kids went on to a trade program, the military, or dropped out at 16. He was a voracious reader and so despite going to a HS which did not have “college prep” (and therefore, some holes in his background) he was self-taught in many ways, showed incredible intellectual promise (and Brown agreed and accepted him despite the holes).
Having met many kids from the second bucket-- some affluent who go to college because “that’s what you do”, some not affluent who take on insane amount of loans and exhaust their Pell getting degrees in “Tourism management” and the like, and some who regardless of their parents financial support just can’t hack being in college with some expectations of academic performance, however minimal.
But you can’t conflate the two. I have no problem with colleges offering remedial opportunities for otherwise academically inclined students whose HS prep wasn’t complete. But college seems like a strange place to park a kid whose HS schedule was filled with study hall, partying, and social media if that kid really doesn’t want to be there AND doesn’t have the required prep to succeed in college classes.
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Seems like this is a big one, at least in my neck of the woods. We have been personally acquainted with a decent number of kids over the years who’ve gone on to attend large public universities and washed out. Of that washout cohort, various combinations of substance abuse, not attending class or doing the work and not making sufficient progress for their parents to agree to continue paying for the education seem to be the fact patterns. I’d bet a lot of kids come close to, or are in danger of joining, this group, but then manage to get it together. They don’t blow up, but they need another term, or two, or three, to graduate. I’ve seen a lot of that too. My sense of it in my region of the country is that there are a lot of people out there who associate the classic collegiate experience with joining the Greek system, big parties, big sporting events, even bigger parties, and photographing all of this fun on social media.
So I wonder if it’s really an academic preparedness issue. It really isn’t that hard to get a bachelors degree in something, even business administration. But you can’t spend most of your time screwing around, which is what I think happens with a fair number of kids.
Of course, if your primary exposure to primary and secondary education is private preparatory school, then it’s likely you’re not running into too much of this, and it would then be natural to interpret the issue as one of academic preparedness. If your kids were in public high school, you tended to see wildly disparate outcomes.
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Where on Princeton’s website do they state that Precalc is the minimum math requirement?
(Hint: Alg 1, Geom, Alg II, and AP Stats will get an applicants “four years of math”.)
Setting aside whether, from Princeton’s perspective, it is a wise use of Princeton’s vast resources to bring a small segment of their students up to speed . . . Why do you think attending Princeton would be a waste of resources for a student who hadn’t been adequately prepared in Pre-Calculus?
Interesting. Have there been faculty polls on this issue? If so, can you provide a link to the data?
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Hasn’t it always been well understood that the expected fourth year of high school math is precalculus, and that AP statistics is a side branch that is best seen as an elective?
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There are astounding math students at colleges all over the country who did not take calc in HS. Mostly because it wasn’t offered. It doesn’t mean they are too dumb to benefit from a college education.
CC really does fetishize calc, competition math, acceleration in math in middle school, etc. without much appreciation for the resources that may or may not be available to other kids.
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Yet the notion that many are “too dumb” for college oftentimes seems to be the unspoken undercurrent in these threads.
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Trying to avoid your consistent attempts to narrow this issue to one or two schools, since it pertains to the vast majority of US 4 year universities. I am not overly concerned about the 2 dozen kids enrolled in remedial math at Pton (pre-covid), though they are likely to continue to experience challenges taking their second required quantitative course there.
I am concerned about the tens of thousands of students nationwide enrolled in remedial courses in 4 year schools who will flunk out or take more than 4 years to graduate due to remediation necessity.
I think you are the only one claiming students are “too dumb”; the rest of us think they are unprepared and not the right fit at this time. Similarly, international students need to demonstrate a high degree of fluency in English for admission. They may be brilliant, but without the English fluency, they are unprepared. That school does not offer remedial ESL classes; applicants need to acquire fluency elsewhere
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