By Professor
Doom
Last year, legislators, at the behest of
higher education administration, removed remediation from higher education.
Open admission policies, and the student loan scam, allowed everyone who wanted
a free check to come to campus to get one. Trouble was, most of these people
had no interest in education, because, well, they were there for the check
(many classes, especially at the community colleges, lose 50% or more of the
students on check day). Rather than dilute the legitimate education in the real
courses, massive remedial programs opened up, and many campuses now offer
minimal college level coursework, and are now primarily facilities for
extraction of student loan money.
Unfortunately, the students in the
remedial classes weren’t doing well. They were good at collecting the checks
(the real reason they were there), but not so good at coursework, even when it
was taken down to the third grade level.
Many people really don’t believe the loan
scam is what has warped higher education, so allow me to try another allegory.
Suppose that you could go to McDonald’s, and simply by showing up and placing
an order, even for the cheapest thing on the menu, you could get a check for
$20. Would you go if you had nothing better to do? Of course. I have no
interest in eating anything on the McDonald’s menu, but I’d totally stop by,
order the least I could get away with, take my free money, toss the food (or,
more accurately, foodlike substance) into the trash, and go home afterwards.
McDonald’s, of course, would quickly realize that their food was irrelevant, would
quickly abandon any pretense of food quality, and instead focus on maximizing
profits while giving customers the cheapest possible menu item and handing them
the government check.
This, in short, is what has happened to
higher education, and why over 90% of class aren’t college level and have the cheapest possible
material in them. It’s part of why even the supposed “actual” college
courses often have nothing in them. Legislators listened to administrators, and decided to just
get rid of remediation, socially promoting students past the basic material
that would give them a chance to succeed in college, if they wanted to even
try.
Unfortunately, administrators didn’t
listen to educators, who would have been happy to tell them it’s not the
existence of remedial courses that are causing so many students to come to
campus and fail.
Last year, mandatory remediation was
removed, putting students that can’t read/write/anything at the 9th
grade level directly into college level courses. This year, we see the results:
a greatly increased failure rate. Administration was only too happy to say they
saw this coming all along, but…imagine if educators had a say in how education
should be run. A recent article on Inside Higher Ed was thrilled to make administration
look smart regarding the failure of social promotion, but faculty were at least
allowed to have their say in the comments section.
Some highlights, demonstrating the
disconnect between administration (who wanted this fiasco) and educators (who
were ignored when they tried to prevent it):
The increasing number of under prepared students
enrolling in credit bearing courses combined with the increased pressure to
increase success and graduation rates at higher education institutions may lead
to less rigorous academic courses with more generous grading systems. I have
seen this happen in several fields of study. There often is no "quality
control" system in check to see what type of learning takes place, but
rather the focus is on success rates.
How is this not obvious? Grade inflation is
already prevalent on campus due to these factors. It’s easy to fix, however, and with GPA basically meaningless now, why
not even try?
If students can't read and write well, then avoiding
English classes is not the solution.
This highlights a glaring problem with
college social promotion. If students that cannot read or write at the 9th
grade level are doing fine in the “college” courses, how can you believe those
college courses are legitimate? What realistically happens is these students
just flounder around on campus for years, accomplishing nothing but deep debt
for themselves and fat loot for admin. This is why over 90% of remedial students get nothing from college, despite the promises from admin that a
few months of remedial courses will actually make a difference.
Having those mandatory remedial courses
accomplished two important things: it allowed for legitimate college courses to
be offered, and it allowed those students that were legitimately there to learn
(yes, there are some) a fair chance to play catch up on the years they wasted
in school.
At my institution, until recently, if you placed at the
bottom you took 4 remedial math classes before getting to college level.
Imagine, a college student requiring 2
years (four courses) of remedial math class before he could finally make into
College Algebra (which, all by itself, was the remedial course of thirty years
ago). The open admission/free checks madness that administration cannot figure
out causes these courses to pop up, in a vain attempt to find material that
even a student who never comes to class can still pass.
Even a dash of integrity at the
administrative level would have prevented the creation of two years of remedial
courses, acknowledging that students that don’t have the mental capacity of a
12 year old don’t belong on college campuses. Instead, they were shuttled in,
for those sweet, sweet, student loan checks.
Those of us who teach freshman general education or
required courses know that failing these courses is very hard. Most profs will
bend over backwards to not a fail a student, especially a hard working,
marginal one. The "F" grades are no doubt due to the fact that
student language and math skills were so poor that they simply gave up on doing
written assignments or were utterly unable to work the simplest math problem.
This is powerful evidence that the students were REALLY, REALLY not prepared
for college.
Honest, a student that simply tries is
going to pass these courses, because that is, realistically, the current
standard (it was the standard I used in my decade at community college).
Wouldn’t it be neat if educators had some real input into explaining why
remediation doesn’t work? Instead, the people that are actually in the
classrooms get ignored…
Intermediate algebra (mentioned in the article) earns
college credit but is not "college level."
It’s worth pointing out that College
Algebra, the same material students learn in the 10th grade, was a
remedial course and is now a college course on campuses across the country.
Intermediate Algebra, the same material students learn in the 7th, 8th
or 9th grade, was already turning into a college credit course in
Florida, but this isn’t country-wide, yet. Right now, “can perform at the 9th
grade level” is considered sufficient for college, but it’s just a matter of
time before “can perform at the 7th grade level” will be the minimum
requirement for college work.
Yes, this is an indictment of our horrid
public education system, but not that long ago, US higher education was
considered the best in the world, attracting the best from everywhere to come
here. How long can we maintain that reputation when coursework is diluted down
to the material most 12 year olds know?
Another teacher
with 20 years of experience agrees with what I’ve been saying about how the
material we’re now teaching is well below high school:
It is nearly impossible to help even willing adults
achieve a leap from 5th-grade to 12th-grade reading/writing levels in 3 months
(one college term), when they already did not achieve this in seven YEARS of
schooling past 5th grade , and totally impossible for the high % of remedial
students who do not attend classes or complete assignments (based on 20 years
of teaching remedial reading/writing classes).
Again, any educator would agree with the
above, and yet the majority of our higher education teaching resources flows
into attempting what is, quite obviously, impossible. Even when documenting
that most of my remedial students were not attending class or doing
assignments, admin still informed me that I needed to maintain an 85% passing
rate.
Passing rates can also be inflated. I recently took a
graduate level course in which the professor had to post articles (remedial
level) on how to read and write effectively because the college grads in the
course were unable to write coherent summaries of required reading.
There is immense pressure on our
incredibly vulnerable faculty to inflate those passing rates, and it does lead
to aberrant students in even very advanced classes, who quite obviously have no
business being there. I even noticed this when I took an 8000 level
administration course, some of the students could not write even a single sentence with any
resemblance to standard English conventions involving spelling, punctuation, or
grammar.
If the good folks in FL had read the historical
literature on the issue of mandatory placement in developmental education they
would never have gone down the path so taken.
These sorts of statements are always a
chuckle. Administration simply doesn’t hear anything besides what it wants to
hear, so, of course, they will completely ignore all known studies and common
sense on this topic.
“In Texas we've come up with a different solution. Put
the students who are not ready for college level mathematics into a course that
requires, at most, high school level thinking and call the course ‘college
level’.”
“…Florida did that decades ago. It is called Liberal Arts
Math,…”
I
know, I know, I’ve documented this before, but the gentle reader needs to
understand that the things I say in my blog are not the rantings of a lone
madman…most everyone in higher education knows what’s going on, and it’s
happening most everywhere.
And, tell your faculty that the course must be
college-level rigorous but all students must pass.
Ah, memories. When I taught at a bogus
(state) institution, I was told this sort of line many a time. On the surface,
it seems like a possible solution: be legitimate in what you cover in your
course, but pass everyone. Trouble is, a legitimate course requires work and
effort…if you assign anything like that you get student complaints, and admin
also makes it clear that student complaints can lead to termination.
But yeah, you’re often told as faculty to
maintain standards and pass everyone, and that guideline is at many for-profit,
state, and non-profit schools. Despite this, graduation rates are still low.
You need to pass students to keep them on campus (for those sweet, sweet,
student loan checks), but graduating students makes the Poo Bah sad (because
then no more sweet, sweet, student loan checks).
Does the gentle reader see that “sweet,
sweet, student loan checks” are the only factor in higher education? Honest,
the student loan scam hasn’t helped higher education.
One consequence that I foresee is that a "college
algebra" course will become more of a hybrid of "college
algebra" and Intermediate Algebra, especially in the rigor of the exams
given. As more and more part-time faculty teach such courses, this consequence
is very likely to happen because for contingent faculty, their continued
employment so often depends on "how their students perform".
Again, educators know what’s going to
happen here. “College Algebra” will just be redefined down from 10th
grade math to 8th grade math, and the faculty will be given the
option of either keeping their mouth shut, or being fired. This is of course,
the heart of the fraud of higher education today, and it’s clear the trend will continue.
It seems to me that the type of student who ignores
recommendations and doesn't have an understanding of their abilities is
probably going to do poorly regardless of what class you put them in.
This, ultimately, is why no amount of
fiddling with (or removing) remediation will ever be effective on a mass level.
Yes, there is a small percentage of remedial students that need, and can be
helped, by remedial courses. These are typically people that never had access
to even our miserable public school system, but the majority of students who
failed to learn the basics in the 3rd, 4th, 5th,
6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th,
11th and 12th grades really isn’t going to be helped by
more of the same.
Higher education used to have small,
special courses for those few, special students that really had an interest in
learning, but for whatever reason had significant gaps in what they already
knew. I taught such courses, and they were effective.
Administration, in their quest for more,
more, more of those sweet, sweet, student loan checks bloated out the remedial
programs. Now remedial courses are
taught in massive lecture halls by poorly paid and often unqualified adjunct
faculty that must follow orders or be terminated…they may have good pass rates,
but they’re a waste of time and don’t even help the students that are
legitimately there to learn.
Eliminating mandatory remediation, while
still allowing people that have no business on campus to enter the college
courses, just further debases higher education in a vain attempt to get even
more of those sweet, sweet, student loan checks.
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