EDUCATION SO INCLUSIVE NOBODY LEARNS ANYTHING. Sometimes a Yogi-ism is the only possible intellectual argument. Consider a recent collection of articles and comments about the parlous state of public higher education. I start with a long Washingon Monthly report describing community colleges as Higher Ed’s Bermuda Triangle. It starts encouragingly enough.

Sacramento City is a typical California community college: its students are primarily minority, low income, and go to school part-time. Eighty-five percent of them arrive needing what are called remediation classes, courses like [Jacinth] Thomas-Val’s English-Writing 40. Remediation classes are designed to bring students up to the level needed to get started on the college’s actual curriculum, to close the growing gap between what students have to know at the outset of college and what they learn in California’s crumbling high school system—or, for older students, basic skills they may have once had but have lost in their years out of school.

This willingness to offer opportunities and second chances to disadvantaged students, opportunities that aren’t available in many other countries, is what first appealed to Thomas-Val—herself an immigrant from Antigua—about American community colleges. But in her decades of teaching, she has been shocked at just how unprepared most of her students are, how little they know—and how hard it is to help them.

This article presents the perspective of someone favorably disposed to work with higher education's more challenging students. Later on, we discover the nature of the challenge.

Nearly half of all students seeking college degrees start at community colleges, and of those, a large percentage—estimates put it around 60 percent—must take remedial classes. Remedial students run a high risk of dropping out and not graduating; one robust study found that only 30 percent complete all of their remedial math coursework, and fewer than one in four remedial students makes it all the way to completing a college degree. Students who need remediation drop out at worse rates than community college students who don’t, and the more remedial classes they need to take, the less likely they are to stay in school.

There’s a chicken-and-the-egg element to this, of course. Getting through two years of college is extremely hard for a student with fifth-grade skills—it may be too much to expect from many of them, even with the best help. So it’s difficult to tell what exactly the grim remedial statistics say: Is the gulf between the students’ abilities and the most basic requirements of college simply too wide? Or are the programs failing? We don’t know, and therein lies the problem. Community college remediation is the Bermuda Triangle of the higher education system—vast numbers of students enter, and for all intents and purposes disappear.

The article goes on to consider a number of things, including changing demographics, changing job descriptions, state fiscal policy.

I encourage readers to focus on two words: fifth grade. Perhaps, in suggesting that the state universities send the high schools a bill for each credit hour of remedial arithmetic and writing their students racked up, I was not being bold enough. And Sacramento City is not the worst case.

But for the courses that enroll hundreds of students a semester who need years of remedial education to get ready for college, [San Joaquin] Delta [Community] is going to say no.

"Over the years, there's been a movement to get to lower and lower levels of basic skills, so we now serve some students at first, second and third grade levels" of math and reading, [Delta president Raul] Rodríguez said. In most of these courses, very small percentages (well under 10 percent, and sometimes closer to 1 percent) ever make it into college level work, he said. "We just can't afford to offer these extreme remedial levels any more."

As California goes, so Illinois -- another polyglot state with less by way of a good-government tradition. Perhaps for lack of resources, the community colleges and the state universities will go out of the remediation business.

Much of the commentary I've seen suggests the high attrition rate in higher education is a consequence of tight budgets. Here's Paul Krugman.

For generations, talented students from less affluent families have used those colleges as a stepping stone to the state’s public universities. But in the face of the state’s budget crisis those universities have been forced to slam the door on this year’s potential transfer students. One result, almost surely, will be lifetime damage to many students’ prospects — and a large, gratuitous waste of human potential.

I fear, however, that the waste begins much earlier, perhaps even earlier than the third grade. And, heroic efforts by dedicated teachers notwithstanding, the presence of frustrated young adults with early-elementary reading and math skills in college, even in remediation, drags down the other students. There's a lengthy Richard Vedder essay at Minding the Campus that proposes an undermatching explanation (referring to students with the grades and test scores that qualify them for a more highly-regarded university than the one they attend) for relatively low graduation rates. He suggests that moving undermatched students to stronger universities would encourage completion. Perhaps strengthening the universities those students (who might be place-bound in some way) actually attend would have the same effect. Here's my proposal ("The Issue is Standards") two years ago.

"Again: consider the old state university model. Keep it cheap and kick out anybody who doesn't maintain a 2.0 on a four-point grade averaging scale at the end of a year."

Otherwise, perhaps, the end result will be more of the same.

As the president has challenged us to do, flash forward to 2020 in a hypothetical world where the U.S. has the highest graduation rates in the world and the highest number of college graduates anywhere to be found. What would that world look like? An overemphasis on graduation rates, instead of an emphasis on quality learning outcomes, may create a world in which we have many college graduates, but few who are truly skilled. Colleges and institutions in the for-profit, state, and private sectors generally care about learning outcomes. But what happens if they are pressured through federal and state policies to graduate as many students as possible, under-represented or not? Certainly, we will have met our goal. But will the increased $2.5 billion investment have been worth it?

Be careful what you wish for, Mr. President. Higher graduation rates are not necessarily the tide that lifts all boats.

(A Cato-at-Liberty post raises a separate objection to the allegations of starvation budgets: that the resources already committed have not been productive.)

The dean at Anonymous Community, who linked to one of the articles about California community colleges, also invokes the international competition.

In essence, at the very moment that American higher education is facing its worst fiscal challenges in living memory, the Chinese system is expanding at a record clip. All over Asia, higher ed is a rapid growth industry. Asian colleges are building capacity and cutting-edge facilities at the exact same time that American colleges and universities are finding that even adjuncting-out the faculty won't balance the books anymore.

He's reacting to a Chronicle of Higher Education report on the rising universities of China.

Across East Asia, governments are funneling resources into elite universities, financing basic research, and expanding access to vocational and junior colleges, all with the goal of driving economic development.

Hong Kong and Singapore, compact port cities that have lost their traditional importance as logistics and manufacturing centers, are rushing to turn themselves into centers of innovation.

China has invested in a group of select universities that it hopes will become globally renowned hubs of technological and scientific research, while in South Korea, leaders are spending billions of dollars on projects designed to spawn top-notch laboratories and attract foreign universities as partners. And as Taiwan's economy loses ground to China, it is trying to draw top talent through aggressive international recruitment.

Asia's approach to higher education contrasts markedly with that of the United States, where, even before the global recession hit, the percentages of state budgets dedicated to higher education have been in steady decline.

It's probably going to be some time until self-despising administrators in those Chinese universities go on guilt trips about underserved Tibetans or marginalized Uighurs. Until that day, Chinese higher education will gain ground on a United States higher education too consumed with inclusion and access and too involved in positional arms races in basketball and football, and too willing to take high school graduates that haven't really finished grade school.