An example of how the folks in charge plan to improve remediation

Ever Changing Remediation: A Specific Example

 

 

“Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.”

-Napoleon

     An honest look at what’s going on in higher education today might lead one to believe that the folks running the show are deliberately trying to hurt people, or at least exploit them for profit. I’d like to present an example of how administrators respond to the disaster of remediation. Look below, and see a plan to “fix” higher education, and decide for yourself if malice or incompetence best describes the actions of our leaders.

 

 “We’ve been doing it wrong, focusing on getting remedial students to pass remedial courses. This new process puts remedial students directly into college classes, and passes them from there!”

--Administrator, explaining the latest amazing new idea

 

     Administrators are well aware that remedial students tend to fail college classes, and rather than take the choice of integrity (stop loaning money to so many remedial students), are always very eager to try something, anything, to get these students to pass. Improved passing, improved retention, is the only definition of a good education an administrator can understand, all those unemployed but degree-holding people occupying Wall Street notwithstanding.

     There were six hours of meetings to address the latest method: “co-requisite” courses for remedial math and English. First, administrators present an array of statistics regarding how amazing the new idea is: at every level, “education” is ignored, and instead all improvement is measured in passing rates. Every statistic presented to us is all about retention (the word administration uses for “passing”). After a flood of such data, impressive to administrators and irrelevant to helpless educators, we’re told of the successful new plan.

     What’s “co-requisite”? Instead of having students take remedial classes before taking college classes (for example, taking remedial math before being allowed to take College Algebra), the new plan is to have students take both courses, remedial and college level, at the same time. The remedial class is more like a lab, with teaching assistants giving more personal help. And the statistics show it works! Yay, passing rates are much higher!

     It’s trivial to mislead the effectiveness of these programs via statistics, and most everyone outside of administration knows it—all the grey-haired faculty simply chuckle behind the administrators’ backs, having seen this stuff dozens of times. It takes nothing to pass more students, for example one could just make “C” the lowest possible grade in the course, so that everyone passes. 

     The math co-requisite program wasn’t above manipulation to show how successful it was. Students were self-selected; only those that accepted the warnings that it would require hard work and dedication could enter the co-requisite program. Sure enough, this program showed greatly improved retention rates, 80% as opposed to the nationwide average of around 50%.

     Restrict my classes to only hard working, dedicated students, and I’ll probably do quite a bit better than average, too. In twenty years of being subjected to these pitches, I’ve yet to see a program where they divided self-selecting students like these into two groups, with the program only being used on one group. This would go some way to showing it’s the program, and not the self-selected students, that make the difference. Why is this basic, rudimentary, obvious, idea seldom, if ever, implemented? It’s because legitimate studies that use such controls don’t show any major improvements.

     Next, we were shown how the co-requisite math students had much higher grades and passing rates, using a variety of poorly demonstrated interactive techniques and group projects. Group projects are a red flag that something is bogus about the coursework: there’s no learning in group projects, merely, at best, a theoretical division of skills by students doing what they already know how to do (a recent book, Academically Adrift, shows that the more time students spend in group work, the less they learn).

     The pitchmen back up the improved passing rates with an important-sounding statistic. Every incoming student had to take a standardized placement tes. The new students had an average score on the test of 211. At the end of the course, they re-administered the tests to the students that passed, and the students got an average score of 232. A 21 point improvement on a standardized test! The program works! Yay!

     The pitchmen gloss over that 250 is the cutoff score for students to go into College Algebra for the placement test, so all they’ve done is pass students out of College Algebra who still don’t qualify to take College Algebra. Instead, the improved scores are celebrated.

     Much like with the self-selected students, there’s no control group, no set of students outside the program to compare test scores to. For all I know, a typical student that passes College Algebra has a 30 point improvement on that placement test, or that simply taking the test repeatedly will cause a 30 point improvement. That would make the co-requisite students worse off than if they’d never entered the program…no control group means there’s no way to know. It would cost a hundred bucks or so to double-administer those tests to a class or two of students, but I guess there’s hardly any money left over after the many thousands of dollars spent implementing the program and pitching it to various states.

     Even without a single control, there’s another issue here. Only the students that pass the course are re-taking the placement test, and yet it’s taken as evidence of improvement when the average score goes up. The students that failed the course don’t retake the test, so we don’t have their scores. You take out all the F students, and the average grade increases...and this is presented as legitimate improvement. Practically everyone on the stage selling this to us has a Ph.D., a research degree, in Education or Administration, and none of them see even this issue.

     An empowered faculty would point and laugh at administrators using such poorly compiled statistics to justify a major re-working of programs. Instead, the faculty sit quietly and take it. One brave soul asks “How do you expect us to teach the college material with the unprepared students sitting right there, doing nothing?”…the people giving the pitch mumble out a response that the answer will come later, but it never does.

     Someone with a legitimate research degree would be embarrassed to present this isolated statistic, a single uncontrolled test score, as useful, and yet, one of the pitchers of the new plan says she’s studied it and is sure it works. She proudly tells us she’s an actual mathematics professor, instead of saying that her doctorate is actually in Education. Administrators in suits just stood there as she “misled” us, though some of them had to know the truth. She gave no hint at all of her degree in the presentation or in any of the handout materials, as though she were embarrassed about it. I had to scramble around online to find that detail out. I found something else online, too.

 

Faculty: “Did you see her students’ comments on Ratemyprofessors.com?”

Me: “Crap, I was going to tell you about it. I didn’t think anyone else goes there.”

Faculty: “I thought I’d do some investigation.”

--Faculty are not stupid, we know better than to take anything from administrators at face value. We also know when administration wants us to “say something about” their new ideas, they only do so because it’s easier to cram things down our throat if we open our mouths first.

 

     My online search also found what students had to say about her, and indirectly the program, at Ratemyprofessors.com. Despite the professor’s presentation claiming great teaching skills, she has miserable ratings there. Now, I grant, only the most irate students would go to an online site and post their complaints, but after being forced to watch videos of testimonials from students about how life-changing—I’m not exaggerating!—the new program is, it’s fair to present testimonials biased in the other direction.

     She’s rated in several categories at Ratemyprofessors.com, but “easiness” is by far her best category. Granted, “easiness” isn’t on a collegiate evaluation of teaching form, but this website caters towards student desires. An administration that was actually curious about challenging students-- critical to education!--would have such a question on the evaluations, and it’s very telling that there is no such question on the official evaluations. Here are some abbreviated quotes, see if you can spot any red flags:

“Hardly a teacher at all. All she does is talk, talk, talk. The second day of class she taught us how to turn on our calculator. The tests don't make sense.”

“HORRIBLE!!! she is so rude and doesnt seem like she cares about anyone including her TAs. She acts as if she is better than everyone and her lectures are completely WORTHLESS. STAY AWAY!”

“A lot of people don't go to the lectures because they are extremely boring and attendence doesn't count but sometest questions ome straight from lecture. The labs are never fully coordinated. Tests are all about theory more than solving problems. Use the answer choices to solve test questions.”

“Her tests are always about concepts with no actual calculations of answers.”

“Her tests are all on principles and alghorithms. There were hardly any problems you had to actually solve”

“stay away from this teacher taking this class with her will be the biggest waste you will ever come across”

“Wholly education/grant-funded class. Does a horrible job explaining in class. Try to get a different professor unless you enjoy being taught like you're in middle school.”

     Not a single student gave a positive review, not one, and many professors at Ratemyprofessors.com have positive reviews. Looking too closely at negative student evaluations usually isn’t a good idea, but when the same specific complaints keep coming up over the course of years, that usually means there’s some truth to it. Complaints like this had to have turned up in student evaluations administered at her school; administration only looks at passing rates. In reviewing those quotes, a reasonable conclusion about her higher passing rates would be that she gives easy multiple choice tests where you can get the answer merely by reading the questions, the program has nothing to do with it. All administration saw was higher retention, a complaint like “waste of time” is insignificant next to the only goal of merit to an administrator.

     After the pitch, the head pitchman tells us that when this program is tried at other institutions, retention rates vary from 25% to 77%; in other words, outside of controlled situations, the co-requisite plan doesn’t work. He asks that if we get a high retention, we should contact him and tell us what we did so they can put that in their recommendations for the program. Some faculty drove hundreds of miles to be told how to implement this plan (sic) to improve retention, and the people pitching it already know it doesn’t work.

     Year after year, colleges cycle through one plan to improve retention after another, as apparently clueless administration buys into one hokum plan after another. Never is it considered that maybe you can’t teach people  that don’t want to learn, and that simply not accepting such people in the first place would help far more than admitting anything with a pulse and then optimizing the best way to extract the maximum amount of money from the victims of this “higher education” scheme.

     The Cycle of Remediation:

1.       College courses with failing students in them have “low” retention.

2.       To improve retention, failing students are pre-identified and shuffled off to remediation.

3.       To improve retention in remedial courses, various plans are tried, but for reasons administration cannot fathom, remedial students still fail more than non-remedial students.

4.       To improve retention, remedial students are put back in college courses.

5.       Return to 1.

     A remedial course, years ago, was an important tool, helping a student who just had a few weaknesses preventing him from going into higher education. Administration has taken that tool and turned it into a weapon capable of channeling herds of suckers into “higher education,” where they are fleeced in the short term, paying way too much for courses that will benefit them far too little, and slaughtered later when the loan bills come due.

      So we’re back to the question: incompetence, or malice? Do the people running higher education know the evil they do, or not?

Think about it.

 

 

 

 

 

The ultimate effect of remedial education

 

The ultimate effect of remedial education

By Professor Doom

 

“Hey. We’re selling a plot of land, and thought we could ask our math professor friend for help. The land is a rectangle, 120’ on one side, and 300’ on the other. I know you need that much. What’s the square footage and how do you get it?”

--question from the wife of a longtime friend, valedictorian at her school, and a bright person. She and her husband just didn’t take math in high school.

 

     Now, it’s easy to blame the high schools, or the students themselves, for the unprepared students entering college, but that’s not fair. High schools offer College Algebra-level material, and often more advanced math, and also simpler courses, as well as other options. They tell students “this is what you need for college, this what you need to get by, and this is what you need to pump gas” giving their students the option to take the challenging material, something simpler, or no math at all. Students choose (or are advised by counselors or parents) not to take the challenging coursework, improving their GPA and chances of graduating high school. I don’t blame students for taking the easy way out when asked to do so; I would have myself if my parents had let me. A student who puts effort into it can avoid having a math class for his last few years of high school, if he wishes; I commonly get students that tell me they haven’t taken math since the 8^th or 9^th grade, and looking at their tests, I am in no position to disagree.

 

     “Find the exact area under the curve of the graph of y = 3x² + 2 between x = 2 and x = 4, using the limit of sums method.”

-- High school calculus problem. Using sums in this way is way beyond what I would attempt in an elementary college calculus course, where I often spend considerable time going over fractions.

 

     I’ve certainly heard tales of bad teachers, teachers not doing their jobs, teachers that don’t care about students, and, of course, teachers that succumb to the immense pressure to pass unprepared students. While I believe such teachers exist, I’ve met quite a few public school teachers, and through tutoring many high school students, I can only conclude that the vast majority of teachers are dedicated, hardworking, knowledgeable, and do a legitimate job in offering real mathematics courses to their students. In short, students that want to learn have a fair opportunity to do so.

     Perhaps public schools shouldn’t give students the opportunity not to learn, but I suspect they’ve long since figured out that forcing students into classes they have no interest in taking doesn’t really help the students. If only that knowledge could be passed up to postsecondary institutions.

     If a student chooses not to be prepared for college, it’s no great surprise that such a student, when tricked into going to college, is not prepared for it. A student shouldn’t be made to suffer forever for a poor choice made in high school, but…recall how years ago getting into college was not a certain thing. It was reserved for those who worked hard and studied, demonstrating they were willing to do what it takes to achieve higher learning. The great slobbering greed  and the “increase the student base at all costs” major goal of administration have led to a massive influx of unprepared, often wildly unprepared, students onto college campuses.

     These students, being unprepared for college, naturally do very poorly in college courses, and administration (with “graduation rate” being a goal of what makes a college good) clamps the pressure down on faculty to increase passing rates, as well as opening up an array of less regulated remedial courses, with no restraints on what goes into such courses. Unfortunately, the remedial faculty (often with less qualifications and job security than other college faculty) are bullied into having high pass rates, and the only surefire method of doing so is to lower the difficulty as much as possible.

 

(Two students at my door): “Hi. We’re in your statistics class, and we have a question about lines of regression.”

(Me, welcoming them in): “Certainly, those are some rough formulas, the key is to be very careful and not try to skip steps.”

(I take out some paper and start setting up a typical problem)

Student: “No. We’re not even going to try that. Our question is for when you already have the line, like for y = 2x + 1, because we can get that on our calculator. How did you get the points, and how do you graph the line? We’ve both had 6 hours of developmental and got A’s in College Algebra, and neither of us had to do anything like that.”

--Students at an accredited institution where developmental math wasn’t handled at all by the math department, and College Algebra wasn’t either, to some extent.

 

     The example above really emphasizes what’s going on in college now. The remedial departments do whatever they want, and realize they get better passing rates (the goal) if they do nothing and hand out A’s (the “average” grade in college is A-, now). These A students then hit a brick wall when they go into actual college classes. This forces course material in those classes to likewise be watered down, or else face sharply dropping pass rates. Remedial work was supposed to prepare students for college; instead, the college work has turned into remedial.

     The example above has students in their third year of college still not knowing how to graph a line, but  “graph a line” is hardly a skill that only the most educated can have. In 1977, I begged my father for a board game, Code Name: Sector. I wanted it because it had a computer (little more than an LED display in those days, running off of a 9 volt battery), but he was reluctant. The game was for ages “12 and up,” you see, and I was but 10 years old; eventually he relented, and I had the toy. Why the age restriction? Well, the computer gave out the coordinates of two points, which you had to plot on a grid, and then connect the dots with a crayon. This is what is known in mathematics as “graphing a line.” That’s not even addressing the rest of the game, which was about tracking down submarines, drawing a line segment representing the course of a warship was merely a small part of it.

     The issue: in 1977, corporate America (never accused of overestimating consumer intelligence) had no doubt every interested 12 year old could read a page of instructions explaining how to plot two points and draw a line between them, confident enough that this task could be a small part of a game.

     In the 21^st century, a large portion of my job is trying, and often failing, to teach high school graduates how to plot two points and draw a line between them—a concept most have never seen before. To emphasize: college administration sees nothing strange in having an experienced professional spend a week or more training rooms full of normal adults how to do what any child can learn in a few minutes with just a bit of effort. If I was 80% successful in teaching adults skills that children used to have, administration would be thrilled.

     Remedial classes, unlike college classes, have no real restraints or guidelines as to what goes in them. With no restraints, “reduce difficulty as much as possible” results in very low difficulty indeed, which is why at one campus, it was quite common to have students with 4.0 GPAS, 9 hours of passed math courses…and still completely overmatched by what should have been basic concepts.

     Since the flood of unprepared students doesn’t stop at remediation, faculty in the higher level courses have no choice but to likewise reduce course requirements, or lose their position. So, in my case, it isn’t just statistics students that can’t handle graphing a line, nearly half of the students I have in calculus, for years now, are unable to add fractions, despite the high GPA and multiple prerequisites. Teaching calculus to students that have no basic math skills is about as reasonable as teaching Shakespeare to students that don’t speak English.

     As long as administrators view everyone with a pulse as a source of a government check, with no concerns about how such a person can end up trapped in a lifetime of debt, remedial students will be a common feature on “higher education” campuses. Student loan debt for college education is over a trillion dollars now, but with the majority of that “higher education” money spent on pre-college coursework, nearly every institution in this country should be prosecuted for fraud, or at the very least have their accreditation, which asserts institutions act with integrity, revoked.

     But never has an institution lost accreditation due to lack of integrity, even when the institution approves ripping off students or to doing strange things to children in the showers. How can a system this corrupt have anything legitimate to sell you or your children?

 

Think about it.

All the remedial classes in one place...

A look at the “serious” courses in college today.

By Professor Doom

 

     I’ve seen plenty of articles bemoaning ridiculous college courses in such questionable subjects as The Morality of Scooby Doo or the like, but nobody speaks of what’s going on in the “serious “ subjects of college, like in mathematics.

      The great remediation scam has allowed institutions of higher learning to greatly expand their student base, but only by offering many courses that are comparable to what is available in high school. Actually, to call the material high school level is rather generous. It makes sense to look at math remedial courses in some detail, to make it easier to see what’s going on in this critical stream of institutional revenue:

1.       College Algebra

 

“It’s called College Algebra because nobody would pay for a course called The Algebra You Should Have Learned in High School.”

--Faculty member (not me, though I wish it were).

 

Algebra is the basic language of mathematics, it’s all but impossible in the modern world to accomplish much in math without some familiarity with the syntax of algebra. I was a bit slow in math, and a year behind the “top” students. Thus, I took algebra in the 11^th grade, instead of the 10^th grade like the better students, but the point is college material today used to be early high school material.

 

“[That professor]’s math class is hard. You’ll have to come to class for it.”

--overheard student comment, defining what makes a course hard, relative to other courses, no doubt.

 

     College Algebra is a necessary course, the language, notation, and attention to detail learned there is critical to almost every other field. It is the prerequisite to over a 100 courses, and yet administration is perpetually trying to get rid of it, unable to understand that doing so shuts students out of many of the most profitable fields of study—profitable for students, not for administration.

 

     The “College Algebra” course offered at my college (and elsewhere) is little different than the remedial, non college credit course from the 80s…it’s also little different than the algebra course I took in high school. The primary difference is that College Algebra has less information than my high school course, lacking discussion of matrices, circles, ellipses, distance,  hyperbolas, inequalities, and a few other things. This is actually representative of many low level college courses: they have less than what used to be taught in high school courses of the same name. Thus, College Algebra belongs in a discussion of remedial courses because it used to be remedial; only the stroke of an administrative pen has changed its status.

 

     Passing rates in College Algebra courses usually run a bit more than 50%, although not much more (at one state university, the rate went from 50% to above 85% from one semester to the next, due to extensive pressure and threats from administration to pass more students).  This course is all but mandatory, however, and is much loathed by administration (an “impediment to graduation,” as one Dean put it), despite it being a borderline high school course. College Algebra now represents the most advanced material a student might learn.

 

Pitchman: “What we know for sure is, the students who score high enough for College Algebra usually took courses past College Algebra in high school. The students who don’t quite make it into College Algebra took it in high school, and so on down the line.”

 

Faculty: “Wait a minute. You mean there’s hard evidence for what we know to be true: that to achieve a goal in learning, you must push past that goal to succeed? Why haven’t these results been published?”

 

Pitchman: “That was off the record.”

 

--Exchange between faculty and pitchman, discussing results learned from a very popular standardized test very often used to place students.

      The quote above hints at a truth: the most advanced skill a person has mastered cannot be the most recent skill that was learned. In order to be comfortable with high school algebra, a student must push past the concepts in high school algebra.

 

      Because the passing rate of College Algebra is so unsatisfactory in administrative eyes, many campuses offer an “Explorations in Algebra” type course, a fake course with “Algebra” in the title so it at least sounds like it might be a real course. These courses are rationalized by “removing material the students don’t need,” and it’s no small amount of material. There are variations, but the course seldom has significantly more in it than a remedial course, albeit for college credit. Well, sort of college credit: the course is seldom transferrable and doesn’t prepare the student for anything (remember, College Algebra is a prerequisite for over 100 courses). That said, the fake algebra course generally has a much higher passing rate, which makes administration very happy…and is worthless when the student tries to apply it towards any degree anyone would be willing to pay for.

 

     After years of diligently working to make a college degree represent no more than a high school diploma, college administrators, by promoting “Explorations” type courses,  are now working to make a college degree as meaningful as graduating from the 8^th grade. This is why books like Academically Adrift can easily show that about half of college graduates have no measurable increase in cognitive skills over what they had in high school; 6 years of college, and all the student gets is a worthless piece of paper and a mountain of debt.

 

 

  

“Dammit. I studied for two hours and STILL failed that test.”

 

--student angrily telling me my test was too hard. The two hours represented all the time he’d put into the course over the last month. How did he get the idea that two hours of study would be sufficient to understand a month of material? Hint: other courses he was taking.

 

     Although the passing rate is relatively low, College Algebra really isn’t that tough a course. Every semester, I’ve had multiple students that failed the course before take it again, come back and pass the course, often with a B or better. They’re only too willing to tell me the difference is they actually studied the second time around. For most students, passing this course is simply a matter of study and effort, which can be quite the confusing barrier when compared to many other courses.

 

     On the other hand, there are absolutely people (perhaps 10% of the population) that have a real problem with math. The most common issue they claim to have is they “can’t remember anything” when it comes time to take the test. They are not lying about this lack of memory, but in speaking with them, asking for demonstrations of knowledge outside of test time, they can’t remember anything outside of test time, either. It’s cruel of administration to force such people to take this course, but in administration’s defense, for accreditation, they have no choice but force students to take it. I wonder what kind of education a person can have when he remembers none of it, and how administration can claim to be acting with integrity when they go out of their way to sell an education to such a person.

 

“How much is 2/5?”

 

--Student question, a high school graduate who passed a remedial course the previous semester. I tried to explain via a pie graph and other examples, but I’m not convinced I helped her even a little. A history professor jokingly offered the best answer: “3/5.”

 

     Many students come into College Algebra unprepared. With no ability to work with fractions or distinguish between multiplication and addition in algebraic notation, there’s little chance they can pass. This leads to our first official remedial (nowadays) course:

                                                                               

   

2.       College Preparatory Algebra II (remedial math)

 

              “The Civil War was inevitable, but it didn’t have to be that way.”

---quote from a student history paper. A month before the paper was written, the history professor ranted extensively to the rest of the faculty how annoying it was that he had to stop his lecture, and spend time defining the word ‘inevitable’ to his class. This is common to remedial students: they can look you dead in the eye, nod in agreement that they understand, and still not comprehend a word you’re saying. Remedial students can take other college classes, even if they have yet to take, much less pass, the remedial courses.

 

     Most remedial rstudents need only take this one course before going on to a college career (which has been shown to end in failure for over 90% of remedial students). It covers basically the material that public schools address in 7^th-9^th grade (remember, “College Algebra” is 10^th grade). Students are usually in this course because they failed this material in the 7^th, 8^th, 9^th, 10^th, 11^th, and 12^th grade.  The majority of meetings regarding math instruction are about how to increase retention (i.e., passing) in this class.

     A large minority of students in College Preparatory Algebra II are non-traditional. They took and passed the material years ago, but have simply forgotten it, or at least are extremely rusty. While spending four months reviewing in college is a painfully slow and expensive way to go about regaining these skills, I can appreciate not everyone has the initiative to go down to the library, check out a book, read and re-read and practice for a few hours until the skills come back. I’m sure administration would never suggest such a course of action to a student, not with a sweet student loan check on the line.

 

“I co ming offise to day AAAAaaaa?”

--E-mail from a Vietnamese student. She got an A in my trigonometry class, dominating the other students despite not knowing much English. Yes, she did work in a nail salon, and no, she didn’t graduate the equivalent of high school in her native country. She asked one question the whole semester, coming to my office to do so: “How come students that know nothing are in this class?”

 

    Another small minority of students are in remedial math because their English skills are weak; the course helps with this, as the student is really there to learn how to express concepts in English, having already learned them in his or her native tongue.

     Remedial students will initiate calls or answer their phone during class. In College Algebra, upwards of 20% of the class at any given moment will be texting/playing on their cell phones, but the percentage of students engaging in this activity in this level of remedial class is usually around 50%  (it’s rather amusing how many students think they are fooling me by keeping their hands in their crotches for 50 straight minutes, or digging in a purse every five minutes of class).

 

3.       College Preparatory Algebra  I (sub-remedial math)

 

Me, addressing class: “Ok, so last class we learned about complementary angles, worked some problems with complementary angles, and I assigned homework problems on it. Any questions on the homework?”

 

Student: “Yeah, problem #1.”

 

Me, reading the problem: “Angles A and B are complementary...before going to the rest of the problem, what does complementary mean for angles?”

 

(Several moments of silence, then a student responds)

 

Student A: “They’re equal?”

 

(Three other students, echoing): “Equal?”  “Equal?”  “Equal?”

 

Me: “No. The mathematical word for ‘equal’ is ‘equal’. This is a different word, and it means something different. Take out your books, and look in the index or the section the homework is in, and find the definition of complementary. Or look in your notes from last class, where I gave you the definition before assigning the homework.”

 

(Sixty seconds of page flipping passes, and a student responds)

 

Student B: “They’re the same?”

 

(Three other students, echoing): “Same?” “Same?” “Same?”

 

--An actual exchange in sub-remedial class. I couldn’t make this up if I tried.

 

     College Preparatory Algebra I basically covers material from the 6^th to most of the 9^th grade. If that seems to overlap with College Preparatory Algebra II above, that’s because it does; years of my explaining this to administration accomplished nothing, because the course as-is had a higher retention rate.

 

     Despite this being nearly the same course as College Preparatory Algebra II, the students that place into this course are clearly weaker than in the “advanced” remedial course—those placement tests are pretty good. The students in this course typically spend years on campus, going nowhere but deeper in debt.

 

     If a student comes to enroll, and needs a year of remedial courses before he can take what used to be a remedial course, maybe administration should ask  “Are you serious about learning?” rather than telling him “Check this box stating you’re looking for a degree, so you can start getting student loan money.” It’s a long hard road to higher learning from the 6^th grade.

 

 

4.       Basic Mathematics (pre-sub-remedial)

 

“It’s dummy-dummy math.”

--this course as described by a student.

 

This course covers perhaps 3^rd to 5^th grade material, from how to add and subtract whole numbers, to plotting points on the number line. Every homework problem must be done in class because no understanding of the material can be taken for granted.

 

I’ve never seen or heard of a student going from this course to anything like a successful college career. With over 90% of “normal” remedial students failing to have a college career, this isn’t surprising. For one semester, we offered an even more basic math (a sub-pre-sub-remedial course). This course was promoted by one instructor as “taking out the math they don’t need, like squares and rectangles,” and allowed to offer it after singing the “better retention” siren song to administration.

 

 

     There’s a huge issue of integrity in the pre-sub-remedial course. If you’re teaching 3^rd grade material to an adult, you consider that adult to have the cognitive skills of an 8 year old at best. There’s nothing wrong with trying to improve education and learning, but at some point, someone should think  “This student didn’t learn this in 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th, 6^th, 7^th, 8^th, 9^th, 10^th, 11^th, and 12^th grade. Maybe he doesn’t want to learn this and we shouldn’t loan him money to learn it.” Failing that, admissions should think “Maybe loaning this person money that goes right to us would be taking advantage of someone with a mental disability and it would be not be acting with integrity to do that.” So far, these possibilities have never been raised at any meeting concerning remediation, and administration continues to sell these courses to anyone willing to go into debt to take them.

 

Let’s go over that last idea again:

 

If I targeted elderly patients with dementia to the point that they had the cognitive skills of an 8 year old, and manipulated them into signing contracts turning over their life savings to me, I’d be considered a…scumbag.

If I targeted actual 8 year olds, and got them to sign contracts so that every penny they saved in their lives went right to me, I’d be considered a…fool.

If someone comes to my university, and I document they have the cognitive skills of an 8 year old, then make them check a box so that I make more money and the student will never save a penny in his life I am a…successful university administrator.

Hugely pressing issues of integrity aside, considerable resources in higher education today are being blown on courses like the above, for remedial students. I’ll concede there is plenty of indoctrination going on in higher education, but the courses above are representative of the “serious” coursework, on a subject I’ve not seen anyone else ever complain about in all the articles railing against the perils of higher education…should higher education be mostly about re-learning the skills taught in high school and lower?

Think about it.

 

 

 

The Black Secret of Higher Education

Something of a rerun, but it really can't be emphasized enough:

The Black Secret of Higher Education

By Professor Doom

 

 

     A great scam needs suckers, and the more suckers, the better. It didn’t take long before administrators realized that the big, big money was in broadening the market, and student enrollment has more than doubled since the 80s.

 

     In today’s college environment, most anyone can get accepted into an institution of higher learning. Student loans are not strictly acquired by people who “want to learn,” even if they don’t know all that much to begin with. Instead, student loans are granted to anyone who can “check a box saying you are a degree seeking student.”

 

     The easily acquired and plentiful student loan scheme means anyone can go to college, but what if the student has little in the way of academic skill or interest? A popular TV commercial hawking college education has the would-be student sing about not doing great in high school—enough to keep a student out of college, years ago, and evidence the myth is still alive.

 

     It’s not just late night TV commercials that target these potential students for enrollment, although there has always been some option for remedial classes at college or university. Only a few such classes were offered, since “in the good old days,” it was rare for students lacking in basic skills to nonetheless gain admittance to an institution. A student without basic reading, writing, or arithmetic skills could get in, but thirty years ago, if he didn’t catch up quickly, the university would prevent him from destroying his finances and life. Nowadays there are many sections of remedial courses taught each semester, often more than sections for “college” courses. These courses generally move slower than normal courses, since administration thinks when a student is behind, he’ll catch up by slowing down. These poor souls spend years wandering from one remedial course to another, only to get destroyed by the pace of real college courses when they finally make it.

       

     Administrations at many institutions have become very successful at talking people into checking that box, and remediation--administration likes to use the word “developmental”, but I’ll stick with the correct word, “remedial”--has come to dominate “higher education” now. Around half of incoming students require remediation. It would be a clear majority, but college material has been defined down quite a bit (the first year courses I took in the 80s are now second or third year courses, and even some graduate courses are little different than what used to be first year courses).

 

     College student population has more than doubled…but most students are remedial. It follows then that the growth of the student base in higher education has been due to the elimination of standards.

 

     Even institutions that still have admission standards still admit remedial students. To take a college math course the student might need to score 250 on a placement test, while the admission “standard” requires the student to score 200 to get admitted to the college. While one has to chuckle at a college “standard” that admits students not ready for college, such is quite common. Having a great number of students going into remedial courses looks bad for institutions of higher education, but administration tirelessly works to fix this problem, but not in a way that a person of integrity might think:

 

 

“We’re going to reduce the score necessary on the placement test to get into College Algebra so that even the weakest students will be told they can skip developmental courses if they want to. They’ll still be competitive.”

 

--Administrator, explaining a clever plan to reduce the number of students taking remedial courses. Until I heard this, I had no idea that getting an education was a competition. This change in policy led to several disastrous years in the entry level mathematics courses.

 

 

     So what is a remedial student? When a student enrolls, often he’ll take some sort of placement test to see where he fits as far as reading, writing, and mathematical skills. There are many sorts of tests, each with their own special scoring system, ultimately translated into either “good enough for a college level course” or “should take a remedial course.” Most institutions favor some form of standardized test, paying a dollar or two per student for the privilege of having an independent company quickly grade and administer the test online.

 

     These tests are far from perfect, but have been around for years, with constant improvement by many private corporations legitimately interested in providing a better, more accurate product. They are quick, cheap, and about 95% accurate for determining which course a student should take. Quick and cheap are important factors—the days of real “entrance examinations” for incoming college students are long over, students want to be admitted quickly, and administration complies. The 95% accuracy might sound very good, but it means that in every classroom of at least 20 students, you’ll expect one student was misdiagnosed by the test. Not perfect, but good enough, all things considered.

 

     As hinted at above, administration hates losing control of students to placement tests, and is always looking into ways to gain more control. The most likely way in the future will be through PARCC, a placement test that will allow students to place out of placement tests. It doesn’t take a calculator to see the amount of money being poured into re-inventing and centralizing the placement tests is huge. Administration clearly wants this control, and a reasonable person might wonder how well they could be trusted with this power.

 

     A student that does poorly on a placement test, no matter how poorly, is never turned away. Never. “No problem,” says college admissions, “you’ll just need to take a developmental course or two and then you’ll be fine!”…as though a person that’s blown off education for twelve years is really going to make it all up in a few months.

 

     So higher education is mostly about remediation, but does it really help these people? The answer comes from the black secret of higher education today:

 

      Fewer than 1 in 10 remedial students will get a 2 year degree within 3 years¹.

 

     That’s above a 90% failure rate, achieved (sic) after the student has wasted 3 years of his life in school, quite possibly after the college soaks up $20,000 or more in loans. All the growth in “higher education” is in remedial students, and they’re being horribly abused by the system.

 

     If there were any integrity to higher education, administrators would look at the 90% victimization rate and say “we need to stop doing this.” Instead, the bar just gets lower and lower and lower…administration responds to failure by increasing the amount of failure. One might well conclude they just want the checks and don’t actually care about the students at all.

 

     Let’s compare this kind of abuse of the customer to another industry. Depending on various factors, around 20% of smokers get lung cancer eventually over the course of a lifetime…this rate is so high that the institutions which promote smoking, tobacco companies, are considered evil for creating so many victims.

 

      More than 90% of remedial students waste years of their lives and bury themselves in debt by getting sucked into higher education…what word describes the institutions that create a much higher rate of victims than tobacco companies?

 

Here’s a chart to put things in perspective for a remedial student:

 

 

>90% Chance of a remedial student wasting 3 years of his life with nothing to show for it

 

67% Chance of dying after a stab wound to the heart

 

52% Chance of dying after a stage 4 colon cancer diagnosis

 

30% Chance of dying within 5 years of a heart transplant

 

20% Chance of a smoker getting lung cancer

 

<10% Chance of dying after being hit by lightning

 

     Now, getting stabbed in the heart or struck by lightning are activities people should avoid…and yet remedial students are actually encouraged to go to college. There are surgeon general’s warnings on packs of cigarettes. Why aren’t remedial students warned about the disastrous side-effects of college loans?

 

     40% of students that start in remedial never make it out of remedial courses. Of course, the college gets the loan money, while the student gets the debt, so the college has no reason to tell the student such depressing information…he might change his mind about going to college, and there goes that sweet check.


 

 

“Someone’s making a lot of money off this. Not us.”

--Mathematics department head, at another daylong meeting addressing ways to improve remediation.

 

     Added to the high failure rate is a massive double-dipping factor. When a community is being sold on opening up a community college for “higher education,” or paying for a university to expand its capacity for students, it’s never mentioned that the majority of the courses will be high school (or lower) level material—material the community already paid for their children to learn in high school or earlier. The community’s tax dollars pay for the institution, which re-teaches (at best) the material that the students didn’t want to learn when they were children.

 

     The people building these institutions don’t warn about the double-dipping to the communities supporting them. Likewise, the remedial students will never be warned about the grim odds and disaster they face when they check the box asking for student loans.

 

     Higher education loan programs were sold to the American public as a great opportunity to advance into a higher class, but it’s turned into a massive scheme to take advantage of the most vulnerable members of the public, indebting them so deeply, so permanently, that they’ll never be anything but broke. Is this what higher education is supposed to be all about?

 

Think about it.

 

 

 

1.       See Remediation: Higher Education's Bridge to Nowhere, available online; the results come from looking at data from millions of students. Everyone in education has known for years that remediation is a disaster, but here’s a study that shows it unarguably.