“If you’re missing foundational skills and pushed directly into college-level classes, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and stupid.” That was Shruthi Pradeep explaining her situation upon arriving at Las Positas College in Livermore, California, to a writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Pradeep, who is 19, says she struggled academically in high school and fell behind due to illness. She earned a diploma, but expected that she would be able to catch up in math and other subjects at Las Positas before moving on to a four-year university.
Unfortunately, California, as the Chronicle explained, “prohibited two-year colleges from requiring a student to start out in remedial course work unless the college could prove the student was ‘highly unlikely to succeed.’” Instead, these schools were required to enroll students directly into credit-bearing courses, supplemented with tutoring. That meant even students who did not understand basic algebra very well were being placed into calculus classes.
Lawmakers perhaps had good intentions with new rule. They worried too many students were stuck in remedial classes for which they weren’t getting college credits, and thus prolonging their time earning a degree. This is a serious problem. About 40% of four-year college students drop out before they finish, and many of those students are saddled with debt and no degree.
The most obvious solution to too much remedial education is making sure that kids learn foundational math in high school and don’t graduate unless they do. It’s crazy that the same California taxpayers footing the bill for public schools where students aren’t learning math are then also footing the bill for these same students to take the same courses over again in public colleges.
According to the California Policy Center, 80% of California community college students are placed in remedial courses. In the California state university system, it’s about 30%, and in the UC system, it’s 10%. As I wrote recently in a piece on grade inflation, all of the stakeholder incentives are aligned — teachers, administrators, even parents and students — to pass students along to the next level rather than fail them.
Which is not to say that no one warned California’s legislators about what would happen if they went through with this insane plan. Indeed, the associations that represent professors at community colleges were quite clear. Offering “co-requisite” courses, where faculty give students more “scaffolding” for the higher-level subjects, never made sense, according to the folks who are actually doing the teaching.
Math is learned sequentially, which means you can’t teach students algebra while you’re also teaching them calculus. Lucia Landeros, a student and chemistry tutor at Cuesta College, told state lawmakers that this approach is “like asking a contractor building a house to pour the foundation, prop up the walls, and tile the roof — all at the same time for the sake of efficiency.”
But eventually things come to a head. The Chronicle reports, “At one community college, up to 80 percent of the students enrolled in calculus 1 were expected to fail in the fall of 2025.” And those were the students who decided to take it. Plenty of students who feel they are unprepared will simply not take a math class at all.
But the goal was never just helping individual students. Rather the groups that supported this effort were trying to “shrink equity gaps.” Apparently, the Chronicle reports, a number of groups sponsored by the Gates Foundation made it all but impossible to oppose these reforms, which were intended to increase the number of minority students entering STEM fields.
In other circumstances it would be easy to imagine that lawmakers would reverse course. But the fact that they have tied these efforts to racial outcomes makes it virtually impossible to do so. Placing students in remedial classes, these advocates implied, is all but racist.
President George W. Bush made famous the idea that we are harming certain children with the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” offering poor and minority students an inferior education because we think they can’t handle more rigorous academics. But now these same students are falling into a chasm between low expectations in elementary and secondary school and high (or at least higher) expectations in college. They are graduating high school without the basic tools they need to succeed in our economy and then being sent to colleges where they are struggling. Racial preferences for underqualified students, test-optional policies, grade inflation and a political class more concerned with appearances than student success have created a perfect storm.