STORRS, Conn. — Mark Merliss took college-prep courses at an outstanding urban high school in a state admired for its top-notch public schools. He was accepted at four colleges, including his first choice, the University of Connecticut, where classmates come from elite private schools.
Yet when the lanky 18-year-old from Meriden arrived on campus last fall, he felt shaky. His high school senior year English was heavy doses of reading but little writing, he said. He still struggled getting his ideas down. "I'll sit for a half hour thinking of a word. . . . I knew what I wanted to say, but I didn't know how to say it."
Eager to succeed — Merliss plans a career in golf-course management — he was relieved to find English 104, "Basic Writing."
It's a remedial course, though that word does not appear in the catalog. Like its companion, Math 101, English 104 is for undergraduates smart enough but not quite ready for the University of Connecticut.
"I looked at college like, 'Wow!' This is a big place," Merliss said, brown eyes shining, his 6-foot-2 inches sprawled on the cramped bunk bed amid the books and electronic gear crowding his dorm room. "I didn't want to be lost."
Students like Merliss are on the mind of new U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige. In a recent speech to leaders of private colleges, the former Houston schools superintendent assailed America's public schools for sending students to college unprepared.
Noting nearly a third of college freshmen need remedial work, Paige said, "College students should be taking college courses, not remedial classes."
Debate has swirled in recent years around the issue of remedial college courses. This may intensify with the Bush administration's stated intention of improving the nation's public schools.
It's already a quandary for college administrators and policymakers, as the children of baby boomers swell enrollment, as the necessity of a college degree heightens, as colleges accept more people of all ages who are able but not fully prepared.
The term "remedial" carries a stigma, and so some schools use terms like "developmental" or "compensatory," if they name the classes at all.
And students admitted to the most competitive schools may need extra prepping when they arrive.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers a voluntary physics course, 801-L, for new students wishing to boost their math fluency to keep up with quick calculations in lectures.
At MIT's neighbor in Cambridge, Mass., all Harvard College freshmen take a writing course, Expository 20. For those not completely ready, there's Expos 10, a voluntary, introductory version.
"It is in no way remedial," insisted Nancy Sommers, director of Harvard's writing program. Every year, Expos 10 is taken by about 100 of the incoming 1,650 freshmen, the enrollment determined by a writing test everyone takes the first week.
"You're expected to hit the ground running here," Sommers said. "Some students come from areas where they just haven't had opportunities to write as much."
Not everyone thinks remedial courses signify a problem.
"It's unreasonable to think everybody is college-ready, just because they finished high school," said Hunter Boylan, head of the National Center for Developmental Education in Boone, N.C.
"I'm not one to blame the public schools," said Boylan, also a professor of higher education at Appalachian State University. "We take in tens of millions of children every year with a huge diversity in talents and backgrounds, and schools are expected to kick them out 12 years later, college-ready."
Students like Merliss comprise a sizable minority. A federal survey in fall 1995, the latest available, found 29 percent of first-time college freshmen enrolled in remedial courses.
While the largest percentage of remedial students — 41 percent — were at two-year schools, 22 percent of freshmen at four-year public institutions and 13 percent at private four-year colleges required such academic grooming, the survey found. Math is the single biggest area of poor college preparation, followed by composition and reading.
The survey also found roughly three-fourths of remedial students successfully finished those courses, and most as freshmen.
A new survey is under way this fall, with results due early next year.
Colleges differ in the readiness they require, and how they gauge it.
The University of Connecticut requires English 104 for students who score below 431 on the verbal portion of the SAT admission exam. It's optional for those who scored 431-540. (Merliss said he scored around 500.)
As taught this semester by instructor Will Eggers, the basic writing course is about the same as English 105, the standard composition course. Students analyze literature and learn to hone their views in writing, including the art of revision.
Incoming UConn freshmen also take a "Q" test. It measures readiness for required courses demanding quantitative skill, such as chemistry or statistics. Those who fail, must take Math 101, intermediate algebra. (Merliss passed the "Q.")
Students admitted to UConn generally rank in the top quarter of their high school class. This fall, 2,850 freshmen came to the Storrs campus. Enrollment in English 104 this school year is 329, while 371 students enrolled in Math 101.
Remedial education, by any name, has a long history.
A hundred years ago, 60 percent of college students took math and English prep courses, Boylan said. It was college, not high school, that groomed students for higher education.
After World War II, young veterans filling colleges on the GI Bill needed refresher courses.
The next big surge was their children, the baby boomers, breaking barriers of class and race getting into college and some in need of basics they had never received.
All this was fairly routine until the push for K-12 assessment tests arrived in the early 1980s.
"There's this myth that huge numbers of unprepared students have descended on higher education in the last decades," Boylan said. "The fact is, no one had bothered to count them."
And when people started to count, two of the largest, most open university systems became lightning rods for those who say remedial classes have no place on a college campus.
The City University of New York is phasing out remedial courses in its bachelor degree programs serving more than 128,000 students. They will be no more in fall 2001.
The California State University system, with some 220,000 full-time undergraduates, decreed in fall 1998 that freshmen who fail its remedial courses must leave and get basics they need at a community college.
The Cal State system has identified 300 high schools that send it the most deficient students; with $17 million in state funds, it is working to get those numbers down, deploying student tutors to those schools, sending college faculty to work with teachers and making clear how prepared students must be.
The University of Connecticut may also look to public schools to reduce the need for catch-up work in college. One proposal: Give high schools a report card on how many unprepared students they send UConn.
But responsibility rests with students and the university as well, said Susan Steele, vice provost for undergraduate education and instruction at all six UConn campuses. While students must apply themselves, she said, "there is a real question about what is our obligation to our students if we've admitted them, to make sure that they're successful."
After just three sessions, Mark Merliss said he already felt sturdier since taking Will Eggers' English 104.
"He makes us think, not like my teachers in high school. He not only teaches us, he guides us," Merliss said. With his first assignment, he found, "words were popping into my head."
On the Web:
Federal surveys on remedial college nces.ed.gov/pubs/97584.pdf
University of Connecticut: www.uconn.edu/
Education Secretary Rod Paige talking about remedial college www.ed.gov/Speeches/01-2001/010130.html
National Center for Developmental Education: www.ced.appstate.edu/centers/ncde/homepage.htm