Families Spend $1.5 Billion For College Students To Take High School Courses
These courses cover material considered high-school level, typically in math or English composition.
NPR reports.
Taking High School Courses In College Costs Students And Families Nearly $1.5 Billion
When Andrea Diaz was applying to colleges, she got good news and bad news. The good news was that American University, a private four-year university in Washington, D.C., wanted her. The bad news was that it required her to come to campus early to take two summer developmental-level courses in math and English.
“I was traumatized by it,” Diaz says, “because I felt that they didn’t see in me the potential to do well in college.”
When is a college course not really a college course? When it’s classified as “developmental,” or, less euphemistically, “remedial.” These courses cover material considered high-school level, typically in math or English composition.
“It was teaching us sentence structure and how to write an essay and verbs and pronouns,” Diaz says of the English course she took as a pre-frosh. “It was such an elementary course, I was very surprised.”
Taking High School Courses In College Costs Students And Families Nearly $1.5 Billion (NPR)
Comments
It is her choice whether or not to accept their offer, so I don’t see anything wrong with this. It is far worse and more expensive for a student to come to college and flunk out if they aren’t prepared.
I also think a remedial course would be good for her to learn about hyperbole and her use of the word “traumatized”.
This is not a new problem.
Back in my grad student days, when pan-Gaia was just starting to break apart, I was a TA to a remedial math course. The course was principally designed for foreign students, mostly as a familiarization to technical and scientific English for those who needed it. I was surprised, though, at the number of US students who were in the class.
Now, this was an engineering institution, and I would have expected that by showing up at such a place the student would have some basic interest in, and grasp of, math & science. Not so, I discovered. So, no – this is not a new problem.
“”Students are 75 percent less likely to complete college if they have to take a remedial course,” says Mary Nguyen Barry, the report’s other co-author.” This is badly flawed logic as correlation does not equal causation. A proper statement would have been that admitted students who require remedial instruction in order to be able to successfully compete better are 75 percent less likely to complete college.
The students are just dumb enough to never realize it’s the college equivalent of junk fees.
Not all students admitted are required to do this. This is a form of conditional acceptance reserved for students that are at risk in the first place, and remediation can help ease their transition to college if they can at least get through the remediation. This remediation isn’t a money grab (unless you want to consider their acceptance in the first place a money grab).