Who's Ready for Colege?

Should you be allowed into college if you don't read well enough to understand your local paper? What if you can't reliably write a complete sentence? It may seem obvious that students lacking such basic skills could barely survive high school, much less college, but even students who have trouble reading routinely get into college. In fact, more than 600,000 of the freshmen who arrived at U.S. colleges this fall — remarkably, 29% of the total — are taking at least one remedial reading, writing or math class. Taxpayers spend approximately $1 billion a year on the classes.

Such course work varies in difficulty, but by definition it all should have been mastered by 12th grade. That means we pay twice to teach some people the rudiments. Nothing angers conservatives more than fiscal excess on behalf of the slothful, which is how they see remediation; nixing the classes has become a pet issue for some. In 1999 New York Republicans successfully pushed the City University of New York to curtail what had become vast remedial programs.

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Now the backlash has gone national. President Bush spoke out against the rise of remediation in a back-to-school speech on Aug. 29, and many state leaders are joining the fight. At least eight states now banish all or most remedial students from four-to two-year campuses on the theory that a state's flagship universities should not be teaching someone how to add fractions. Next year Tennessee will begin such a policy, but the state's higher-education commission has suggested something more sweeping: banning the use of state money for any remediation, even at community colleges. Similarly, legislators in Utah, which spends $3 million yearly to subsidize remedial courses, are considering whether to ask those who need the classes to pay for them.

Advocates for the status quo worry that students who are forced into community colleges for remedial classes will never make it to four-year universities. They point to studies showing that only about a quarter of community-college students transfer to four-year schools within five years. "Some of our most at-risk students will have a longer pipeline to get to the four-year institutions, and, unfortunately, not as many will make it," says Melodye Wiens, a remedial-reading instructor who is president of the National Association for Developmental Education. Others argue that states shouldn't ask students to pay more for remedial classes because doing so amounts to punishing them for having attended terrible high schools. Finally, remedial teachers point out that a disproportionate percentage of their students are black or Hispanic. That means states already struggling to maintain diverse campuses in an anti-affirmative-action climate will have to work around yet another obstacle to minority enrollment.

But the stakes are even higher. The number of students who need remedial classes is so great--29% of freshmen, remember — that ejecting them could effectively end the American experiment with mass postsecondary education. That experiment began with the G.I. Bill and really flowered in the 1960s, when the proliferation of financial aid allowed just about any determined boomer who wanted a college education to get one. (Not coincidentally, remedial education had exploded by the '70s.) The debate over remediation, then, is really an argument about what — and whom — college is for. When should the laudable goal of access for all yield to the equally important need to set standards — standards that may exclude some?

Last month I met students who had just begun remedial writing at Middle Tennessee State University, a four-year college in Murfreesboro that is Tennessee's second largest university. Like all the state's other public four-year colleges, Middle won't get state funding for remedial courses next year. Some of its students may end up at Nashville State Tech Community College, where I sat in on a remedial math class. With their gleaming flat-screen Apples and Dells, the classrooms for Middle's remedial students felt like high-tech offices. But my math class at Nashville State had an old projector for transparent work sheets that required instructor Lillian Dibblee to lick her fingers and manually wipe off completed problems. By the end of class, her fingers were black. I wondered if such little indignities might not help explain why only 25% of Nashville State students graduate, vs. 42% of those at Middle.

At both schools the remedial classes were better than I expected. The Middle writing instructor, Crosby Hunt, gave solid advice on matters large ("organize your thoughts before you begin") and small ("the phrase 'egregious a__hole' can be very effective"). Dibblee's lecture at Nashville State included plenty of flummoxing algebra; hers isn't a class where students review multiplication tables. The students were also surprising. Foes of remedial classes seem to believe that most of the students just aren't trying hard enough — and that the others simply lack the intelligence for college work. And in fact I met students who, I suspect, fit both categories.