The New College Try

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Universities are using more than conscience as their guide. When students show up for freshman year ill prepared, colleges pay the price. Today half of all college students must take at least one remedial course, at an annual cost of $1 billion to the nation's public universities. And with the recent ban on affirmative-action programs in Texas and California, outreach is no longer optional. Universities in those states now go door to door not only to recruit minorities but also to ensure that they complete all the necessary course work and paperwork to get admitted. And with many public schools complaining that their new teachers are poorly trained, K-16 partnerships give universities a proving ground for their education students.

In Maryland's university system, educators credit K-16 outreach for a drop in remediation rates and a rise in SAT scores and minority enrollment. In a pilot program in Oregon, high school and state-college educators are redesigning college-entrance requirements so that admission will hinge on a portfolio of student work graded on a uniform scale. In the California State University system, 54% of freshmen had to take remedial math courses in 1998; the following year only 48% did so.

The payoffs have been even greater on the local level. Consider El Paso, Texas, where one-third of the adult residents cannot read English and last year only 75% graduated from high school. Ten years ago, the University of Texas at El Paso joined with that city's community leaders and three of its largest and lowest-performing school districts. Today UTEP's mark is apparent everywhere, from the schools' cheery hallways (the once drab corridors are papered over with student artwork) to test scores.

University and local officials secured more than $30 million in grants and helped overhaul the district's curriculum and teaching methods. Some schools wiped out uninspired drills and work sheets in the younger grades, and high schools began pushing students to take three years each of rigorous college preparatory math and science. Before UTEP stepped in, just a small percentage of students took Algebra II and Chemistry; now more than half do. Compared with 1994, when just one school in the university-aided districts netted an exemplary rating on state exams, last year 18 did. Most important, the university ascribes this year's 3% increase in student enrollment to the partnership's efforts.

The university has benefited in other ways. Teachers in training, who used to crowd into cavernous auditoriums for class, can spend their days on-site at the K-12 public schools. Several mornings a week, a professor lectures in a borrowed room and then the education students fan out to classrooms to perfect their new skills. Says Sally Blake, an associate professor of education at UTEP: "Now I can see what actually works in the classroom with real students and teachers." Henry Levin, a professor of economics and education at Columbia University's Teachers College, says that "universities like to cop the attitude that they can make public schools better overnight." But after working hands-on in those schools, "they become a lot less brash rather quickly."