MAKE THE HIGH SCHOOLS DO THEIR JOB.  Here's an essay from Community College Week, many weeks ago, that tackles the problem of doing the high school's work head on.

Many students who enroll in community colleges, perhaps most, are unprepared to do college work. Public two-year institutions have struggled for decades to remediate students. They have succeeded at times, but mostly those institutions have failed.

Community college students who are required to take one or more remedial classes often never complete them. Moreover, enrollment in remedial classes is itself a strong predictor of which students will drop out of college altogether.

If those long-standing trends continue, the educational and economic thrust expected of community colleges could sputter and stall. At the least, it would fail to hit on all cylinders.

As far back as 1968, a study of remedial programs by John E. Roueche, who runs the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas at Austin, failed to identify a single remedial program that had a success rate of even 10 percent.

If you're rolling sheet steel, would you prefer to start with Distressed Material, or get the melt and the cast right in the first place? The article suggests community colleges that originally provided baby-boom era reserve capacity in higher education subsequently inherited the mission of remediation, or of second chances, but perhaps inadvertently.

“There is an undercurrent of ‘We want our universities to be great, and these remedial students are keeping them from being great,’” says Hunter Boylan, director of the National Center for Developmental Education. “In California they simply wanted to make their institutions more elite. Admitting underprepared students was not consistent with that desire.”

Many influences have contributed to the chronic failure of remediation efforts – including insufficient funds, lack of leadership, inadequate research — but the primary culprit has been the absence of a compelling impetus to do better. Simply put, the country’s major economic, political and educational institutions long ago learned to live with a disturbingly high level of fundamental academic failure. Over time, the systemic inability to bring underachieving students up to academic speed was accepted and, ultimately, institutionalized.

Nationally, about 43 percent of entering community college students require one or more remedial courses, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Using different methodology, Bob McCabe, executive director of the National Alliance of Community and Technical Colleges, suggests that the actual figure is closer to 80 percent.

Again, if you're running a steel mill and 80 percent of the materials arriving at the receiving dock are defective, do you devote efforts at the dock to improving the materials, or do you have a serious conversation with the supplier?