WHEN YOU HAVE EXHAUSTED ALL OTHER OPTIONS.  Perhaps, someday, some university president, finally recognizing that too many remedial students mean frustration for the prepared students, for the faculty, for the remedial students that drop out no closer to a degree than they were the day they enrolled, and for the trustees who face the double whammy of low graduation rates and undersubscribed job fairs, will ask Admissions to experience-rate the high schools, interpret "top third of the high school class" holistically, and send the high schools invoices for the remediation work that's been fobbed off on the university.

That day has not yet arrived.  All the same, City University of New York (via Phi Beta Cons), the canonical people's university, recognizes that it is running out of options.

[T]hat tide of remedial students has now swelled so large that the university’s six community colleges — like other two-year schools across the country — are having to rethink what and how they teach, even as they reel from steep cuts in state and local aid.

About three-quarters of the 17,500 freshmen at the community colleges this year have needed remedial instruction in reading, writing or math, and nearly a quarter of the freshmen have required such instruction in all three subjects. In the past five years, a subset of students deemed “triple low remedial” — with the most severe deficits in all three subjects — has doubled, to 1,000.

It is the People's University, and by law it is required to admit any applicant with a valid diploma.  Some diplomas, however, are less valid than others.

To bring thousands of students up to speed, those colleges spent about $33 million last year on remediation — twice as much as they did 10 years ago. They are expanding an immersion program that funnels hundreds of students exclusively into remedial classes.

But there is concern that the effort is diverting attention from the colleges’ primary mission.

“It takes a lot of our time and energy and money to figure out what to do with all of these students who need remediation,” said Alexandra W. Logue, the university’s executive vice chancellor and provost. “We are doing some really good things, but it’s time that we’re not thinking about our other wonderful students who are very highly prepared. We need to focus on them, too.”

At LaGuardia Community College in Queens, where 40 percent of the math classes are remedial, faculty members like Jerry G. Ianni have been increasingly dividing their time between teaching those classes and teaching courses for academic credit, prompting worries that professors are becoming de facto high school teachers.

That statement is framed in such a way as to suggest that some professors are not happy with being converted into something other than a professor.  And the students are not happy with being told by their high school that they're ready for university, when they're not.

The university’s biggest concern is those students who lag furthest behind in the three subjects. “These students have a really low probability of success, and it’s hard to know how to work with them,” said Dr. Logue, the provost. “There’s no question that the more remediation a student needs, the less likely they are ever to graduate.”

Students are often surprised to learn that they still have hurdles to clear before they can begin college-level work. As a freshman at LaGuardia, Angel Payero, 18, took the necessary assessment tests in August and discovered that he was deficient in reading, writing and math.

There is no direct evidence of somebody in the New York City Department of Education reading Cold Spring Shops. This news report is encouraging.

The New York City Department of Education is also trying to help reduce the ranks of remedial students. It has begun tracking how each high school’s students go on to perform in college, and starting in 2012, it will include measurements of a student’s college readiness in its annual school progress reports. The city and CUNY are working together to align their academic standards and curriculums.

I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes several more summers. Let the thing be pressed. Identify the dropout factories, and put them into receivership.