Why aren’t state universities copying this system?
The high rate of college remediation — as many as 60% of incoming freshmen at some state universities are forced to take non-credit, remedial courses — is more than an indictment of the quality of many high schools. It’s a show stopper for many students, who never end up earning their college degrees. Young men dominate that pool.
This innovative approach by California State University, where the university reaches high school juniors with a test that either guarantees they can take courses for credit or warns them to improve before graduating, works, as this Sacramento Bee article lays out. When writing editorials for USA Today, I praised this idea in multiple editorials.
Why haven’t more states copied it? Universities like to criticize K-12 schools, but they don’t like to get their hands dirty doing something about it. From the Bee:
High school testing helps university freshman avoid remedial classes, study says
lrosenhall@sacbee.com
Published Friday, Apr. 24, 2009
A 5-year-old program to test high school juniors to determine if they’re ready for college is reducing the number of Sacramento State freshmen who need to take remedial math and English.
Freshmen enrollment in remedial math fell 4 percent, and the number taking remedial English dropped 6 percent after California’s public high schools started testing juniors with the “Early Assessment Program,” researchers from UC Davis, Sacramento State and the University of Minnesota report in a new study.
Across the state, the drop means that 2,000 fewer California State University freshmen have to take high school-level math and 3,000 fewer have to take high-school level English.
That’s saving taxpayers and students money, researchers said, and forging a tighter link between high schools and colleges.
“Our taxes go to educate students when they are in public high school. If they don’t learn what they’re supposed to learn and need to take extra classes when they get to college … there’s sort of a double-paying issue,” said Jessica Howell, a Sacramento State economist who worked on the study.
“From the students’ perspective, the classes that are remedial don’t count toward graduation. … This costs them extra money, and it also means it takes them longer to get a degree.”
Typically, about 60 percent of freshmen on CSU campuses have needed remediation in English or math - or both.
“Their high schools told them that they were successful B students, but their colleges told them that they were not ready to do college level work,” the report says.
Tags: remedial
