A college professor friend of mine (not a member of the whackjob nutty professors’ club) has long been telling me of the lack of basic core subject skills possessed by incoming first-year college students. He maintains that this is where the lousy education these high school graduates have received manifests itself.
.
My professor friend is not alone in his observations. Friend Tom sent me this in-depth report from the New York Times (yes, THAT NYT!) that takes a detailed look at the problem of poorly prepared inbound college students:
DUNDALK, Md. — At first, Michael Walton, starting at community college here, was sure that there was some mistake. Having done so well in high school in West Virginia that he graduated a year and a half early, how could he need remedial math?.Eighteen and temperamental, Mickey, as everyone calls him, hounded the dean, insisting that she take another look at his placement exam. The dean stood firm. Mr. Walton’s anger grew. He took the exam a second time. Same result.“I flipped out big time,’’ Mr. Walton said..Because he had no trouble balancing his checkbook, he took himself for a math wiz. But he could barely remember the Pythagorean theorem and had trouble applying sine, cosine and tangent to figure out angles on the geometry questions..Mr. Walton is not unusual. As the new school year begins, the nation’s 1,200 community colleges are being deluged with hundreds of thousands of students unprepared for college-level work..Though higher education is now a near-universal aspiration, researchers suggest that close to half the students who enter college need remedial courses.The shortfalls persist despite high-profile efforts by public universities to crack down on ill-prepared students.
Click here to read the entire article. Ask yourself some questions about the need of remedial help for so many graduating high school students- How can this be possible? Who is responsible? Click here and here for the probable answers to both questions.
