Scholastic Snake Oil: What Remedial Education Makes Worse

Today, a post on College Misery led me to this article about remedial courses in colleges.??

The first remedial class I've taught in about a half-dozen years is coming to a close.? Frankly, I don't want to teach another.? Then again, it's the first remedial reading class I've taught:? the others were for writing.

That said, I can vouch for much of what was said in the article.? A student who has to take a remedial course is less likely to graduate for a variety of reasons.? One, of course, is money:? I've seen students exhaust their financial aid on those courses. ? Others simply have to forego more income for longer periods of time because they have to spend more semesters, and years, in school.? Then there are those who simply become, understandably, discouraged.

Now, I will say that some of the students in remediation don't belong in college.? Remediation in colleges started to appear around the time that American parents started to believe they were failures if their kids didn't go to college.? The number of such classes, and the levels of them offered, grew exponentially as various colleges and universities adopted "open enrollment" plans.? And, not surprisingly, for-profit schools are full of such classes.

The publicly-funded community college in which I've been teaching the remedial reading class offers two levels of remediation in reading and writing, and three in math.?? The for-profit college in which I taught offered five levels of remediation in writing.??

Appalingly, the for-profit school counted remedial credits toward the student's degree--something the community college (and other schools in which I've taught) don't do.? One effect is that students in the for-profit often don't realize those remedial credits won't transfer to other institutions.? In fact, if they were to try to transfer to the community college in which I've been teaching, they'd probably fail the entrance exams and would have to take remedial courses all over again.? Of course, the fact that students' remedial courses count toward their degrees is one of the very reasons why those degrees are all but worthless, save in a few areas.

Now, I am not entirely against remediation.? Some students are, after all, "late bloomers."? Others come from backgrounds that left them deficient in one academic area or another, and still others simply don't know how to be students.? I believe that everyone who is willing to do the work deserves at least a chance to try to achieve their goals; sometimes a student simply needs a bit more help.??

However, I don't like the fact that, in too many schools, remediation is used simply as a way to bring in students--and their loan money.?? It's bad enough that students who have little chance of academic success, or no interest in school, are herded into college just because they or their parents are seen as failures if they don't go.? But I can't think of very many things that match, in sheer duplicity, the way that academic administrators use remedial classes as a way of profiting from the Educational-Financial Complex.?

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