Fraud and Other College Opportunities

I read a blog today that is connected to a newsletter I receive about higher education. The woman was commenting students unprepared for college and she hit a nerve for (in?) me. Here is the comment I sent.
There are so many inherent problems in the school systems in the U.S. that I find it hard to focus on just one. First, when we talk about preparing high school students for college, we assume correctly that their earning potential will be severely limited without at least a two year degree. What good then is a high school diploma? If human resource people were honest, they might admit that the college requirement attached to some jobs is just a filtering agent rather than a true necessity for that level of employment. On the other hand, the high school diploma means so little today that employers want to know that a college experience has brought prospective employees to the point of at least being able to write complete sentences and to tie their own shoes. Second, as an adjunct and tutor at a community college, I have witnessed the repetition of courses in an attempt to remedy twelve years of bad schooling or else alleviate cultural and mental limitations often to no avail. I do not think I am exaggerating to call the developmental (read remedial) course load for some of the students a thinly disguised fraud. They are actively recruited and offered promises of being able to transfer to a four year school and complete a bachelor’s degree. All along, the community college willingly eats up the Pell Grants and other credit hour limited financial aid so that if a transfer ever does occur, there will be little monetary assistance left. It is not unusual for a student to have to pass five remedial courses, the two developmental composition classes and three levels of mathematics. That is a full semester of nontransferable credits (15 hours), and that number assumes none of the courses need be repeated. I am not even considering the returning students who take GED classes through the college and eat up some of the financial aid before ever being regarded as a college student. When the powers that be are confronted with the problem of the student who can not pass the developmental classes, the suggested panacea is either increased bandwidth or workshops to address learning styles. (I sat in on the process of sacrificing a new full time faculty position to buy the next best bandwidth package. At least the students will be able to check their hotmail accounts so the composition course will not be a total loss.) We even offer a freshman seminar that teaches students something about being in college, but the administration refuses to require the two hour class fearing the developmental students will complain about more nontransferable credit hours. Complaints=drop in retention numbers. So students already on the fringe of academic life are left to struggle on their own while some of us try to offer helpful hints about college life and responsibility during precious class time. Some who would have flourished or at least passed if exposed to the study skills and time management exercises in the freshman seminar class flail about for a semester or more failing two or more courses. Let’s see, two hours of preparation versus six or nine hours of repeated classes. It’s quite a system. Third (yes, I was enumerating issues), instead of a cell phone, get a library card, and instead of investing time and money in a bigger, flat screen television, read a book to a child. This is the toughest issue to address. We have full book cases in half the rooms in our home, so it is difficult to imagine a child who has no books to hold, no pictures to see, no text to hear so often it becomes rote. I cannot go into other people’s houses and force them to enjoy reading. I have some ideas, but I have rambled long enough. I just wanted to attest to the fact that at least some ill prepared college students were once blank slates upon which little was written by parents or by teachers in inadequate schools.
Boy, did you hit a nerve. . .