PAYING FOR HIGH SCHOOL TWICE.  Is $5.6 billion a year a reasonable price to pay for second chances?

“Remediation is paying for the same education twice,” said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia. “It is a wasteful use of public and private dollars and an unrealistic solution to closing the preparation gap between high school and college. Doing it right the first time by delivering a high-quality high school education improves the chances of long-term success for students and for communities.”

“Saving Now and Saving Later: How High School Reform Can Reduce the Nation’s Wasted Remediation Dollars” finds that about one out of every three students entering postsecondary education will have to take at least one remedial course. In 2008, reports show that 44 percent of students under the age of twenty-five had been enrolled in one or more remedial courses at public two-year institutions and 27 percent at public four-year institutions. The brief points out that while remediation is a problem for all students, students of color are disproportionally affected.

Saving Now and Saving Later finds that students shoulder a significant portion of the financial burden for the nation’s remediation problem. On average, students pay 42 percent of total postsecondary costs at public four-year colleges and 14 percent at two-year colleges. Because remedial courses often do not contribute credits towards a degree, students lose money and time that could have been spent on credit-bearing courses.

“The very concept is a direct admission that many high schools are not adequately preparing these students,” said Wise. “At a time when states are searching for deficit cutting tools and businesses are requiring a well-educated workforce, the nation must work together to align secondary school standards to postsecondary demands so every student can graduate from high school ready to succeed in college or careers. The potential cost-savings of eliminating the need for remediation are too great to ignore.”

Once upon a time, high schools did that work as a matter of course.

Joanne Jacobs extends, with observations from a disenchanted toiler in the retention pond.

X wonders how to grade “a college student who progresses from a 6th- to a 10th-grade level of achievement?” He gives F’s.

At best, X’s students will earn low-prestige, low-value degrees. At worst, they’ll be discouraged, degree-less, debt-ridden, uneducated and unemployable.

More discouraged, for having the hope of something they're not yet up to dangled in front of them, then yanked away?

PAYING TWICE FOR HIGH SCHOOL.

The inefficiency of colleges and universities reteaching high school has long been a theme at Cold Spring Shops.  A Washington Times report suggests that others are catching on.

Students are much more likely to drop out of college if they feel that they are simply repeating high school, said Bob Wise, former West Virginia governor and president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington-based advocacy group.

Taxpayers also suffer, Mr. Wise said, by “paying twice” for students to take high-school-level classes again, since most remedial work doesn’t count toward college graduation.

In the 2007-08 academic year, the alliance estimates, remedial courses cost about $5.6 billion — $3.6 billion in “direct educational costs” such as taxpayer contributions to state universities and another $2 billion in lost wages, a result of giving up on higher education and missing out on the bigger paychecks that tend to come with college degrees.

“There simply has not been alignment or coordination between the K-12 system and the higher education system about what students need to know,” Mr. Wise said Tuesday.

“What we know about remedial courses is the student and the taxpayer are paying twice. You’re paying a lot of money to get back” to the academic level students should be at on the day they graduate from high school.

Walter Russell Mead, who provided the link, revises and extends.

The truth is that if American high schools (and middle and elementary schools) were doing their jobs, many students could get all the formal education they need in 12 years.

In any case, we need to move from a ‘time based’ to a competency based educational system.  You don’t get a high school diploma because you have spent 12 years in classrooms; you get a high school diploma because you have demonstrated a certain level of core competence.

A fortiori for BA, MA and JD and PhD degrees.  American students could learn much more in much less time — and at much less cost — than they now do. Making this move quickly and effectively is one of the keys to American success in the new century.

The Times article, to its credit, also recognizes that No Child Left Behind equates to No Child Gets Ahead.

A 2008 report by the education advocacy group Strong American Schools found that 80 percent of college students taking remedial classes had a high school GPA of 3.0 or better.

The ACT results fuel critics’ argument that federal education policy, with its heavy focus on standardized tests, does little to advance real-world goals such as college readiness and career preparation.

“Test-driven policies which claim to be improving U.S. public schools have, in fact, failed by their own standards,” said Bob Schaeffer, public education director at the National Center for Fair and Open Testing. “Proponents of No Child Left Behind and similar state-level high-stakes testing programs … made two promises: Their strategy would boost overall academic performance and it would narrow historic achievement gaps between ethnic groups. But academic gains, as measured by ACT, are stagnant and racial gaps are increasing.”

Little by little ...

THE RETENTION POND IS POLLUTED. The Fordham Foundation's Chester Finn wonders why taxpayers should pay for high school twice. (Via Joanne Jacobs. The comments suggest they are beginning to catch on, at a mid-major no less.) In higher education,

Lots of faculty and staff members have jobs that depend on the persistence, even the growth, of remedial (or “developmental”) courses, and plenty of university revenues derive from state subsidies and tuition payments for those programs. Uncle Sam contributes as well, via a host of programs (e.g., the TRIO programs) that underwrite remediation, and the private sector, too, contains many companies that make money by coaching, tutoring, and otherwise helping equip their clients with the skills and knowledge that the regular schools have failed to impart.

In the common schools,

[S]tate officials are understandably nervous about toughening K-12 academic standards at a time when there’s plenty of grumping (including from leaders of minority groups) about how hard it is to reach today’s standards, how many kids are dropping out, and how punitive it would be to expect tougher standards.

Constrained Vision suggests that affirmative-action efforts in higher education are doomed absent precisely those standards.

If you want more black students in college, you need better K-12 education. You need to fix the inner-city school districts where three-quarters of black boys fail to graduate high school. Colleges may be able to soften their admission criteria to admit blacks with lower GPAs or SAT scores, as Wesleyan has done, but they can't relax their standards enough to admit high school dropouts.

Given the shortcomings of the common schools, it's not clear to me why universal college ought be the objective, as Mr Finn appears to believe.

[D]espite ample evidence to the contrary, poll after poll shows many Americans unconvinced that everybody needs to be ready for college. Hence the continuing popularity of high-school vocational education and the reluctance to install a true college-preparatory program as the “default” curriculum. (A few states, such as Arkansas and Texas, have tried to do so anyway, although their notion of college prep may only superficially resemble their universities’ expectations.)

Many university administrators notion of college only superficially resembles their faculties' expectations. But perhaps the state legislature that first votes not to subsidize remediation in college will have the same salutary effect the first employer to bypass the job fair and hire directly out of high school rather than attempt to make sense of inflated grades will.

How much paying for the same material twice is there? King at SCSU Scholars attempts to quantify his university's mathematics arithmetic remediation efforts.

We admit about 2200 new entering freshmen a year, so you can see that about a third need at least some remediation ... So taxpayers are paying nearly $650,000 for getting these students up to a level of math that would let them take ... general education math at a college level, which is more than a bit short of calculus. Students not completing these classes -- a significant percentage -- must retake, and pay again, as does the taxpayer.

Were there graduation exams in high school written as tests of college readiness, it would put out of business programs like our Division of General Studies. When universities have a harder time filling their entering classes with qualifying students, it's not unusual to see DGS enrollments grow.

And memoranda alerting faculty to the existence of the support services proliferate?

I repeat: the public outcry over the failure of the universities to provide the higher education WILL be our undoing. Ward Churchill and Eve Ensler? Sideshow. Research delays the grading of papers? Big deal. Despite remediation, graduates are unable to perform simple tasks? Trouble.

IT MAY JUST BE MISTAKEN.

Thus does the dean at Pioneer Valley Community conclude a meditation on remedial, er, developmental, college courses.

Go ahead and criticize developmental classes if you want, but get it right.  They’re well-intended, but flawed, holdovers from an earlier time.  They’re not anti-student conspiracies, financial aid scams, or profit centers.  If they were, the for-profit colleges would have embraced them.  Instead, the for-profits ducked them, and community colleges are starting to figure out that the for-profits may have had a point, even if for different reasons.  Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean that it’s nefarious. It may just be mistaken.

Some of the comments on the post suggest that remediation, er, development, doesn't feel like college to students, and contributes to student disengagement.  Since remediation comes close to paying for high school twice, perhaps that's not totally out of place.  Yes, that post is from eight years ago.  I've seen nothing to reconsider my position.

PAYING FOR HIGH SCHOOL, TWICE.

A commenter asks me to square my assertions about where higher education's excess capacity is with the recession-induced increases in community college enrollments. A Brookings Institution position paper that purports to make the case for greater support for community colleges (which need not be the same thing as greater support for College Lite) states my case for me.

Faced with high tuition costs, a weak economy, and increased competition for admission to four-year colleges, students today are more likely than at any other point in history to attend one of the nation’s 1,100 community colleges. Annually, community college enrollment is increasing at more than twice the rate of that at four-year colleges, by 2.3 million students in the first half of this decade alone.

Presumably those students had the option of attending community colleges during more prosperous times. It's the recession, not some new enthusiasm for access-assessment-remediation-retention, that's shifting the demand. I therefore repeat this suggestion.

Hive off anything that hints at dumbing the programs down.

The Brookings essay puts it slightly differently.

The rise of these institutions reflects their important roles in training workers, especially first-generation college students, for well-paying, high-demand jobs and in providing students a bridge to even higher levels of education.

That's what the high schools used to do, but I want to hold that thought for now. (I've never fully grasped that first-generation notion anyway. There are plenty of first-generation collegians in the flagships and the mid-majors.)

MORE CHICAGOANS LEFT BEHIND. Friday's Chicago Tribune reports that six percent of Chicago Public Schools' current freshmen will finish any kind of college by their mid-twenties. There is a lot of attrition in the high schools. The article's focus is on Chicago graduates' troubles at university.

The study, which tracked Chicago high school students who graduated in 1998 and 1999, also found that making it to college doesn't ensure success: Of the city public school students who went to a four-year college, only about 35 percent earned a bachelor's degree within six years, compared with 64 percent nationally.

The universities are devoting resources to providing information that perhaps the high schools might have provided.

Northeastern [Illinois University] officials said the study is unfair to the university, which primarily serves non-traditional students, including many part-time students who take an average of 9 years to graduate. Many students are older, low-income and work while in school, said Provost Lawrence Frank.

But Frank said the study does point "to things we need to address," particularly improving the experience for freshmen. The university next fall will require that all freshmen take a small seminar class with a maximum of 24 students. Sophomores will receive more advising about course selection and major.

Some of this work might fall into the category of "paying for the same work twice" that is troubling the dean at Anonymous Community.

Carole Snow, an executive associate provost at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said many students start college unprepared in math and writing.

The university recently opened a math learning center where students can get tutoring and work on study skills.

The article reports on remediation and advising efforts at several Illinois universities.

I have some private information to supplement what the article was unable to report.

To be sure, there were limitations to the study. It only provided graduation rates for students who enrolled full time in a four-year college. It did not include students from alternative high schools or those eligible for special education. Researchers also did not have graduation data from every Illinois college, and DePaul University, Northern Illinois University and Robert Morris College were among those left out.

Northern Illinois University internal research has about sixty percent of Chicago graduates leaving the University "in good standing." But thirty percent of those who enroll graduate within six years. That leaves another thirty percent who leave in good standing, often for lack of money, and forty percent who don't make it.

Several other news stories shed light on the problem of Chicago's high schoolers finishing college. A story the Tribune broke on Saturday refers to an angry anonymous weblog posted by a teacher at Fenger High School.

Typing rambling screeds in an anonymous blog he called "Fast Times at Regnef High," a Fenger High School teacher unleashed his frustration over the chaos he saw around him.

He labeled his students "criminals," saying they stole from teachers, dealt drugs in the hallways, had sex in the stairwells, flaunted their pregnant bellies and tossed books out windows. He dismissed their parents as unemployed "project" dwellers who subsist on food stamps, refuse to support their "baby mommas" and bad-mouth teachers because their no-show teens are flunking.

He took swipes at his colleagues, too--"union-minimum" teachers, literacy specialists who "decorate their office door with pro-black propaganda," and security officers whose "loyalty is to the hood, not the school."

In his blog, the teacher did not identify himself or his students, the exact name of his school or the city where he taught. But like most bloggers, he wanted an audience, so he wrote in his blog that he had leaked news of his site to a few co-workers. Soon enough, the 30-year-old teacher's name was the talk of the school.

And the you-know-what hit the blades ... A teacher has resigned from Fenger, and the Tribune reports the weblog has been taken down. There is a weblog using the same title currently on Blogger, but I offer no guarantee to its persistence or its authenticity.

The animosity stirred up by the blog fueled even more chaos in this beleaguered all-black school in Roseland on the city's Far South Side, among Chicago's worst performing. But the principal said the episode has galvanized the school in a way he had not thought possible--and is encouraging staff and students to talk openly about the problems and how to fix them.

"There is a silver lining," he said. "It brought Fenger together." Johnson said he plans to hold student forums next week to discuss the blog, both the antagonism it revealed and the challenges that need to be fixed.

"He was painting a picture of desperation, and I had a problem with the generalizations he made," Johnson said. "But some of it was true, and that was the tragedy. If he had gone about it in a different way, it could have been a great forum."

Students also were outraged by the characterizations in the blog, even while acknowledging many problems the teacher detailed.

Latasha Ivy, 17, senior class vice president, found out about the blog last week and read it with her mom. They were both angry about the crude stereotypes and didn't understand why the teacher stayed if he was so miserable, she said.

"These are things that happen at Fenger--fights, drug-dealing, gangs--it happens here like it does at other high schools. I already feel bad when I tell people I go to Fenger, because they go, `Ooooh, that's a bad school.' But there are still people here trying to do something with their lives," said Ivy, who has been accepted at the University of Illinois this fall and plans to study biology.

Perhaps it is time to think about the failure of the institutions to serve Fenger's students. Once upon a time, the common schools had as one of their goals the socialization of the young into middle-class ways. It was not done perfectly, as this European Tribune essay on the dirty secrets of class biases in the U.S. reveals.

When I was in high school, I was told that I was not college material. There was no place for the son of a divorced mother working for minimum wage in the Ivory tower, or so I was told. Have you considered shop class, they can teach you the skills you'll need in the type of work that will be available to you without a college degree. Shop class wasn't for me, and it's not that you can't make a good living and love you work as a factory worker or a firefighter. The best men I know, the guys who taught me what it means to be an honest and decent man, were these things. It's that I was told that I couldn't go to college because of who I was. It kicks you down, and it most be something like what it's like being told you can't do this or that because you're just a lazy ... I think you get the idea, and I'm not going to finish that off they way it normally would be by the type of people who look down on others. What matters in life is not whether you are wealthy or white, but rather if you are a decent human being.

So the schools don't track any more. And the schools ought not view any kid a priori as a throwaway. But the schools ought not be enablers of dysfunctional and self-destructive behavior for fear of being called out as classist or elitist. Many of Ms. Ivy's classmates are done in by the local mores long before they have a chance to fill out Urbana's, or Northern Illinois's, or Loyola's application packets.

And the dysfunctional and self-destructive behavior ought not be enabled among the white and wealthy either. The Superintendent's friendly connection at University Diaries sees the effect of that enabling in the behavior of the Duke lacrosse team.

That a number of the players drive SUVs slightly less gargantuan than Hummers, for instance, is not an innocent fact. I don’t have to leave it alone for fear of being labeled a stereotyper. Some people like aggressive and intimidating cars because these cars reflect their own propensity toward violence. Liking to scare and intimidate other people and flaunt their superiority to them, these same people tend to purchase vast and expensive houses that make people who enter them feel small, overwhelmed by the thought of their owners’ financial muscle.

Is there a word for these people? Yes. It’s “Americans.” Millions of Americans are like this. They use their considerable wealth to shut out the non-wealthy world and to keep it at arm’s length when they have to be out and about in it (hence the virtually armored cars). They raise their children with a sense of their untouchable superiority to others.

All you have to do is look at the imagery and language of many of the ads for the big cars I have in mind to see that they often appeal to these people’s aggressive acquisitiveness and aggressive display.

When this sort of community lionizes particular young men among it because they are good at playing a notably aggressive sport, when it rewards its most testosterone-laden population for all sorts of aggressive behavior, on and off the field, the problem of endemic cultural violence deepens.

And when such young men engage in sexual degeneracy as a group -- after which they close ranks about it as a group -- cultural generalization is not something to avoid out of fear of the preppie card, but rather something to take up as a moral responsibility.

In particular, if that sort of bad behavior trickles down. The yobs of the Hamptons are less likely to wind up rattling beer cups in front of Union Station, or dead, than the wannabees of Roseland. The moral responsibility is for the accomplished to cultivate a proper modesty about their accomplishments. (I think that old pejorative, noveau riche, contributed to that responsibility.)

The schools, and the policymakers, might also benefit by rethinking some basic notions of their purpose. Yet another blogburst has addressed the issue of protected speech in schools, this time over a student wearing a t-shirt protesting an official school cause. Professor Althouse asks,

Did the principal disapprove of the shirt because it was disruptive or because it contradicted the school's official message?

All Things Beautiful has multiple links, most addressing the possible erosion of the First Amendment inherent in the outcome of a court case.

But isn't all this fretting over the First Amendment putting process over purpose? Betsy's Page offers the thoughts of a high-school teacher (working in much better conditions than Chicago Fenger.)

My main feeling is that I don't want judges getting into the business of second-guessing school administrators on what they think is necessary for maintaining order in their schools. Once we accept the premise that administrators should be shown deference in making such decisions, do we really want justices in Washington deciding whether certain T Shirts are acceptable and others aren't. At my school, I would like to see a very open policy that would only bar obscene shirts or ones that preached violence. But, I can imagine that certain schools might have more of a need to keep a strict hold on what could disrupt the learning environment there. I might not agree on what they choose to ban, but I'm not at their schools and wouldn't want to say that the administrators don't know their student body better than I do.

That's the effect of a generously-applied constitutional principle trumping practicality. The ruling that "political speech is protected speech" from Tinker v. Des Moines led to the abandonment of school dress codes just in time for me to garner a few "sexy legs" comments in my yearbook, as shorts were no longer proscribed on hot days. At that time Milwaukee Hamilton was as close to whitebread suburban as a city high school could be, but the suburb I have in mind is New Berlin, not Bethesda. I suspect the current administrators at Hamilton might be struggling with what the purported Fenger weblogger (the comments to this post provide a bit more context) is up against.

Or are they so worried that this may generate media attention from inconvenienced parents who have to retreive their little darling's electronics and gang-banging hoodie and hat of choice, or may attempt to hold the school liable via bogus lawsuit threats for lost or stolen items? The fact is, Regnef has no idea as to its legal procedural rights. Confiscation of contraband is one of them.And why institute a standard blue/white dress code? I mean, it's so much more fun to decipher which gang is being represented by appropriately chosen colors, teams, symbols, etc. Amazing - 83% of the school gets government paid free or reduced (about 40 cents) breakfast/lunch, but 83% of the students at Regnef can also somehow afford $100 NBA jerseys, several pairs of gym shoes ...

The principle that political speech is protected speech gets stretched to prevent any proscription of gang symbols or positional footwear races, with the added threat that anyone proposing such proscriptions is at risk of being mau-maued as racist and classist. Meanwhile many of Chicago's high schoolers never get the chance to enroll at university. Does it make any sense to stand on a favored principle when its maintenance is enabling self-destructive behaviors?

I'll give Ms. Newmark's students the last word.

I'm always intrigued to see that my students (mostly 10th graders) are split in their opinions of whether it is a good or bad thing to give the administration power to regulate their freedom of speech. When I began teaching these concepts I expected that students would unanimously feel that there should be no limitations on their speech, but a surprising number feel that the administration should have discretion in keeping order.

Quite.

PAYING FOR HIGH SCHOOL TWICE?  An Inside Higher Ed column proposes Five Myths of Remedial Ed.  The heart of the remediation problem, however, is buried in the conclusion.

Remedial education is the 800-pound gorilla that stands squarely in the path of our national objective to increase the number of adults with a college degree. If we dispel these myths, the solutions become clear: get higher education to articulate what it means to be college-ready, implement those college-ready standards in high school, fund remedial education programs in ways that reward student success, and customize coursework to meet students’ needs. With a dynamic high school population and more than 42 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 64 earning below a livable wage and in need of basic skills support, these are myths our nation can no longer afford.

Call for a rewrite.  Let's take "implement those college-ready standards in high school" seriously.  Does it not follow that students who meet college-ready standards out of high school will require less, or no remediation?  The solution, then, is more likely to be an end to social promotion, in order that eleventh-grade classes aren't being conducted at a seventh-grade level.  Then consider that "42 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 64 earning below a livable wage and in need of basic skills support".  Sounds like a call to introduce the habits of the middle class into kindergarten and elementary school, the way things used to be.

SLOWLY THEY CATCH ON.

If you set the bar high, people will rise to the occasion.  Too often, though, the high schools don't set the bar high, and the Distressed Material turns up at college, and now the house organ of gentry liberals recognizes (via College Insurrection, they read National Pinko Radio so I don't have to) that their donor base winds up paying for high school twice.  "When they attend private colleges, underprepared students from the top income strata are spending $12,000 extra to study things they should have learned in high school."  That's why I'm so enthusiastic about Wisconsin requiring universities to keep track of the sources of Distressed Material.  Perhaps a few more dollars into the science club, and a few more news reports about the chess team, and less spending on athletic facilities and coverage of sports is in order.  What people celebrate they get more of.

"Because of underpreparation and poor performance, we're seeing people having to pay more for college," says [Education Reform Now's Michael] Dannenberg. "High school policy changes could make college more affordable. And higher ed policy changes could promote better rigor and academic preparation in high school."

Another, not necessarily contradictory, interpretation of the data is that remedial education is simply inefficient.

"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. "It's making college a poor value proposition for many families because there's such a high dropout rate."

Inefficiency persists as long as there are no incentives to remove the inefficiencies.  The status quo continues not to work.  The incentives are present, if the universities would but provide them.

SLOWLY, THEY COME AROUND.

Inside Higher Ed provides Arthur M. Hauptman, who describes himself as "a public policy consultant specializing in higher education finance issues," which is a fancy way of saying "swamp denizen," with a platform to consider "Refinancing Remediation."

Every year, because of inadequacies in the K-12 education process, millions of students enrolling in college must take at least one remedial course in math or English because they are not fully prepared for college or career. Although estimates vary, it seems at least one half of community college students and one-fifth of students in four-year colleges take at least one remedial course; many more students enrolling in for-profit schools require remediation, whether they take a course or not. It is also clear that rates of remediation are higher for students from low-income families than they are for the average college student. Of even greater concern, the probability that students taking remedial courses will graduate is much smaller than the already modest completion rates in American higher education.

The most objectionable part of the current student aid system is how this remediation is financed. Students who take remedial courses are typically charged the same tuition as for college-level courses, even though remedial courses usually cost institutions less because class sizes are large and adjunct professors or instructors teach these courses.

Catch that "because of inadequacies?" Caused by whom? Blank-out.

Regular readers understand that it's not right to require collegians to pay for high school twice, which, no matter whether you call it "remediation" or "development" or "accommodation" or "special education" is what you're doing.  That's true whether you put your best teachers or the adjunct whose c.v. came over the transom yesterday or a circus clown moonlighting in the off-season in the classroom.

Apparently the matriculants who turn up in the remedial classes often have deficiencies in other basic skills, which leads Mr Hauptman to the following leap of logic.

For these reasons, this system of paying for remediation must be fixed so that we avoid a continuation of current situation in which millions of students take on large debts they have little chance of repaying. The high school dropouts and graduates requiring remediation also deserve a system in which the chances of their improving their basic skills are significantly improved. And to the extent these changes would improve the basic skills of those who now can’t compete in today’s workforce, this may be the single most important thing we can do to improve our national ability to compete globally.

Let's leave that "national ability to compete globally" aside, as it's a screaming non-sequitur.  "[K]nowledge-intensive high-technology products can be produced using high-skilled workers (think iron puddlers and Web designers) or using low-skilled workers with easy-to-use machinery (think automobile assembly plants and picture presets on McDonald's cash registers.)" Perhaps higher education can produce more of the first type of worker (although that will depress earnings); it's up to entrepreneurs to adapt production technologies to the second type of worker (which has the effect of raising earnings).  Let's work backwards, perhaps that "system in which the chances of their improving their basic skills" is something other than Woke Education, in which, somehow, the students who develop those skills are implicitly sell-outs, "code shifters," to use the current locution.  That gets us back to the heart of the matter.  Instead of the Divine Passive, "must be fixed," let's come up with some action items.  First, identify the high schools that are sending graduates out unprepared.  Second, send them the bill.

Mr Hauptman is not ready to go there yet.

To do this, the financing of remediation should be overhauled so that providers are compensated based on their ability to improve the basic skills of students taking remedial courses and students no longer pay tuition or need to borrow for these courses. That would require moving to a performance-based system of remediation in which students would not be charged tuition for any remedial courses they take. Instead, federal, state and local governments would pay colleges, schools and the other providers of remediation a fee by for doing so, with the providers who do the best job of increasing the competencies of students getting the most reimbursement and the most business.

At least one commenter is.

JOINING THE DEBATE.

The dean at Anonymous Community responds to my suggestion that higher education go out of the remediation business.

The mischievous part of my mind likes it, which is usually a sign that it’s a bad idea.

For reasons that boil down to the Stiglerian argument that, no matter how much of a mess higher education is in, it is the best of all possible messes. Perhaps so. There is a strong presumption that the existing configuration of an industry, including a service industry, is an efficient configuration in the presence of sufficient choices. Newmark's Door reminds us, however, that alternatives, even alternatives that look bad, are sometimes out there against the day when they might be desirable.

Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

(Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, courtesy John J. Miller on The Corner.)

Messy as reality might be, the reality also is that higher education is in a crisis in which people engage in positional arms races to get away, not always successfully, from the remediation muddle. The dean recognizes some of this, yet comes off sounding much like a curmudgeon ("They despise change, even though they complain about the status quo.")

First, and most obviously, it’s unenforceable. How far back do we go? What if the student goes out-of-state? What if a cc raises its tuition, and the high school doesn’t have the money for the increase? What if the student only needs remediation in one subject, but needs to take 12 credits for the coveted “full-time status” that keeps them eligible for financial aid and/or their parents’ health insurance? (This is incredibly common.) How long before evil proprietaries swoop in, and offer to allow students to do an end-run around the forced march to the cc? (I ask that one as a former employee of a proprietary.) How many four-year schools would have the intestinal fortitude to send half of an incoming class away? How many would they actually get back? (In reality, we’d see exceptions for athletes, then for legacies, then for people willing to pay extra, then for the litigious, then for…) A college forced to choose between teaching remedial courses and laying off swaths of employees would probably choose the former, if past practice is any guide.

He's buried the lead in that "in reality" parenthetical. These are the steps by which higher education became corrupted. But corrupted it has become, and perhaps it is time to root out the current corruption before having conversations about how much integrity ought to be compromised in favor of better alumni relations.

CREATING THE NEXT GENERATION OF BLUE COLLAR ARISTOCRATS.

Joanne Jacobs links to a story about a Seattle community college in which remedial mathematics is applied shop math, rather than just another day in thirteenth grade.  Insanity is doing the same thing ...

At most community colleges, students who don’t do well on placement tests must take pre-college classes in their weak subject — math, writing or reading. These classes can feel like a repeat of high school, and they can greatly extend the time and money it takes to finish a vocational or academic degree. Some students get discouraged or spend so much money on the remedial classes that they don’t have enough left to finish a credential.

I've been on record as opposing the college-first mind-set that turns the shop class into a dumping ground for burnouts.  And thus, even where there is good news, there is evidence that Washington State is paying for high school twice.

The program pairs a basic-skills teacher like Lindberg with a subject expert, such as Keith Smith, the machining-program instructor at Shoreline. The I-BEST approach is being used in academic transfer classes, too, for students working on associate or bachelor’s degrees.

Because it uses two instructors instead of one, I-BEST costs the community colleges almost twice as much as a conventional class. The college bears the extra expense, not the student.

That may not be a bug. Businesses, particularly in cyclical industries, might be reluctant to hire apprentices who will be raided away by other businesses, a classic appropriability problem.  But the benefit-cost ratio seems favorable.

But a national study showed that I-BEST programs produce long-term economic benefits that outweigh the added costs. And a state study suggested that I-BEST benefits the entire state because the graduates get better jobs, paying more in taxes over a lifetime.

And students see, immediately, the applicability of the math they're learning.

When algebra for machinists is taught just before the students work on a metal-cutting project, they immediately apply what they’ve just learned, reinforcing it.

The pilot projects also showed that colleges could often accelerate the speed at which remedial math and writing are taught, just filling the gaps in students’ skills rather than requiring them to repeat whole classes.

Kerr also has interviewed hundreds of I-BEST students in his role as I-BEST director and dean at three different state colleges. Many said I-BEST was the first time their teachers had made a direct connection between academic work and job skills.

The apprentices will also discover, quickly enough, that "close enough" has an entirely different meaning on the shop floor, or in the pharmacy.

DOING MORE?

My position on the state of education in the United States is that primary and secondary schools render too many people unemployable by way of an inclusive (read insufficiently challenging) preparation while higher education enables those failures by offering a no-penalty redo of high school, often for credit, and sugar-coating it as a mix of access and retention. Now comes Our President, proposing to augment enrollment, particularly in the community colleges, as a way of building human capital. In the Boston Globe, Northeastern University president Joseph Aoun sees an opportunity to expand that model.

Much of the concern has focused on whether high schools are adequately preparing students for college. (A survey of professors by the Chronicle of Higher Education showed that 84 percent believe their students are “unprepared’’ or only “somewhat prepared’’ to pursue a college degree.)

There has been little discussion about the inverse challenge: Is higher education ready to accommodate - and graduate - millions of additional students?

He sees in the proposal an opportunity to expand all the current management fads: for-profits, no-frills, flexible degree programs, online courses. Perhaps there aren't enough column inches available to make the case that any of these fads will be of any benefit to people who can't manage basic spelling and arithmetic or whose life management skills are weak. (Implicitly, I'm arguing that anyone who can manage these things is already in some kind of college. Correct me if I'm wrong.)

THE MEN INTERNALIZE THE SCORN.

They do so by shunning higher education.

“In a sense, we have lost a generation of men to Covid-19,” said Adrian Huerta, an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California who studies college-going among boys and men.

“It’s a national crisis,” said Luis Ponjuan, an associate professor of higher education administration at Texas A&M University.

[Worcester high school senior Debrin] Adon, who attends the University Park Campus School, plans to buck the odds and go to college. He said he decided this after he realized that his parents, who immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic, want a better life for him. His mother is unemployed now, and his father runs a barbershop.

It's only a crisis if the young men who develop their human capital in other ways don't thrive.

[The pandemic shutdowns] opened jobs for young men from Worcester high schools at grocery stores and at Amazon, FedEx and other delivery companies, said Lynnel Reed, head guidance counselor at University Park, nearly two-thirds of whose students are considered economically disadvantaged. The school is in a neighborhood of fast-food restaurants, liquor stores, used-car lots, dollar stores and triple-deckers — homes usually shared by three families, one on each level, that are a staple of urban New England.

“How do you go away to college and leave your family struggling when you know that if you just worked right now, you could help them right now with those everyday needs?” Reed said.

That’s a bigger pull for young men than for young women, said Derrick Brooms, a sociologist at the University of Cincinnati.

Often, you don't. That's the tragic vision, and that's why it's important for higher education to treat the first-generation, non-traditional, returning adults as strivers when those young men who assess their chances of screening for store manager or senior chef and seek to add to their bag of tricks.

Despite the allure of a paycheck versus going into debt and spending years pursuing a degree, the reality is that “a lot of these young men at 17 or 18 years old end up working 12-hour shifts, getting married, buy a truck, get a mortgage, and by the time they’re 30, their bodies are broken,” Ponjuan said. “And now they have a mortgage, three kids to feed and that truck, and no idea what to do next.”

Stopping education after high school not only limits men’s options; it threatens to further widen socioeconomic and political divides, Brooms said.

I wonder, though, if the Hechinger contributors are asking what sorts of trucks those young men are buying.

Not everyone has to go to college. Faster and less costly career and technical education can lead to in-demand, well-paying jobs in skilled trades, automation and other fields.

Graduates with bachelor’s degrees still generally make more than people with lesser credentials, however. And the pandemic has shown that people without degrees are more vulnerable to economic downturns. Unemployment for them, nationwide, rose more than twice as fast in the spring as unemployment for people with bachelor’s degrees, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found.

Symbolic analysts with degrees could work from home. People who owned businesses in home improvement could probably find ways to stay employed.  Other parts of the service sector, well, those might have been "nonessential" jobs to their governors, particularly in the likes of Massachusetts and the other lockdown states.  Unfortunately, Mr Ponjuan is too wedded to his intersectional priors to see the deeper implication of his observation of life in the rough parts of Worcester. “We have a lot of young men who are completely disengaged from our society because quite frankly they don’t feel they’re being valued as men. So they think, why even try when everybody sees me as a thug, as a delinquent, when everyone assumes the worst of me instead of assuming the best of me?”  There's a sociology of education dissertation to be written, just on that question.  Are we seeing conventional internalized stereotyping of the ethnic minorities, or has that become entangled with the toxic masculinity stuff coming out of Student Affairs?  The online house organ for business as usual in higher education isn't helping today.  "Male students speak in college classrooms 1.6 times as often as women, according to a new academic article published in Gender & Society based on 95 hours of observation in nine classrooms across multiple disciplines at an elite institution."  That's a small sample, and it's likely not based on nine classrooms at the University of Worcester, and yet, it doesn't do any good to tell a young man that although he's not a thug, he still has unearned privilege.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

CAN WE PLEASE STOP TALKING ABOUT 2028 ALREADY???

The world is about to get really fair, very fast.  America is done apologizing for its interests.

Buckle in. "If Trump can pull this off, he has an excellent chance of winning the contest of the century."  Destruction is easy.  There are no utopias.  "Overall, we are far better off and stronger than the doomers will tell you."

Politics, on the other hand, can be hard.  "Trump supporters have enjoyed a heady three months of action on DEI, antisemitism, energy, NGOs, deregulation, border control, Hamas, Houthis, and more, but solidifying those changes will require a strong economy, support from friendly nations, and continued Republican control of Congress."

The weekly round-up of mostly pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

IT'S STILL PAYING FOR HIGH SCHOOL TWICE. An Inside Higher Ed column discovers that community-college study-skills courses might have a positive marginal product. The comments are particularly illuminating. Follow closely the discussion of self-selection. The final comment (as of this posting) notes how much work remains undone.

Trust me, these kids need help with managing their time, their money, taking notes, even with going to class the next day. In my opinion, the biggest challenge they face is simply comprehending that they were lied to in high school about what level math or english they were passing and how much of it they were learning, not to mention whether passing the HS grad exam a year or three ago means they are ready for college algebra or english.

"Remediation" has to begin with a proper first grade.

I PERSEVERE.

Naomi Schaefer Riley informs Chronicle of Higher Education readers of The Abyss Between High School and College.

New York taxpayers are getting duped. They’re paying for students to get a high school education twice. It amazes me that college administrators always seem to have a perfectly good sense of what is required to do college-level work but they can never pass that information along to high schools, or that high-school administrators simply don’t care.

Perhaps higher stakes, z.B., requiring high schools to reimburse higher education for remedial courses, might help.  Higher education's sugarcoating of the problem by renaming remedial courses as developmental suggests complicity among administrators of all types of Big Education in preserving the abyss.

WHY ARE WE PAYING TWICE FOR THE SAME JUNK? Two posts address different dimensions of the university's remediation dilemma. Perhaps the Retention Pond will be drained when sufficient policymakers think about the cost-benefit ratio. Start with something I found at Joanne Jacobs's place.

College students, educators rue unpreparedness.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm called on the state Board of Education to adopt mandated graduation requirements. State Superintendent Mike Flanagan will make a recommendation to the board Nov. 15 on boosting graduation guidelines.

"Everybody feels they have to do something because the economy is so drastically changing and kids have to be prepared to work in a much more technologically advanced world," said Kathleen Straus, president of the state Board of Education.

The problem is clear in the enrollment for remedial math at Wayne State, which has soared 85% in the last four years. There are 1,200 students in 12 sections of the class, a computer-based course.

"These students are coming in at the level of ninth-grade math," said Patty Bonesteel, developmental math coordinator at Wayne State. "Without a doubt, the idea of being bad at math is perfectly fine in our culture, and that's unfortunate."

They're beginning to catch on.

One of the main problems is that high schools simply haven't kept up with the changing economic times, and that has left the United States lagging behind, said Beverley Geltner, superintendent for Southfield Public Schools. And it's not just a school issue.

"It's a national survival issue," Geltner said. "The American standards of education are simply not world class anymore."

Funny how incentives work, isn't it?

There's a related post over at Anonymous Community's place.

Instead, judging by the amount of remediation we have to do at the cc level, what we have for the 13-to-17 population could be described as holding tanks.

Remediation is a live wire, as a political topic. Yet, educationally, it’s an obvious need.

Some have argued that colleges should get out of the remediation business. Leave high school material to the high schools, and don’t bill the taxpayers twice for teaching subject-verb agreement or the pythagorean theorem. Save tax money, and maintain the brand integrity of higher education.

He goes on to note that, for a number of reasons, some remediation is a necessary evil. Point granted. There is, however, an efficient level of remediation, and accumulating evidence that the current level is inefficiently high. It doesn't come for free, and it's draining on people who expected to be working in the higher learning yet encounter ever-rising administrative expectations that those same people do special education. (Think about it this way: do you really want a high-strung test pilot teaching weekend flyers how to read a check list? Shouldn't the test pilot be pushing the envelope on the latest hard-to-unload passenger bus?)

HIGHER EDUCATION'S SELF-INFANTILIZATION.

Kurt Schlichter says Enough!

A house, a family, and a future that involves either dignity or success – these are things walking out into society with a meaningless piece of paper and nearly forty grand in debt prevent. But hey – the important thing is that we continue to subsidize one of the Democrats’ key constituencies and its prime breeding ground for the social dysfunction and soft-handed tyranny that are the hallmarks of progressivism. Too bad if it ruins the lives of the young suckers whose parents pushed them onto the conveyor belt that annually pumps out another crop of credentialed indentured servants.

And anyone who points out that we're paying twice, or perhaps three times, for high school is clearly onto something.

Let’s set aside the fact that community college exists to give everyone the opportunity to get some higher education; today, it’s job is to occupy high school students for a few extra years by intermittently teaching them the things the incompetence of unionized teachers ensured they didn’t learn in public high schools. The “free college” idea offers those of us who have already paid for our own education the opportunity to pony up for someone else’s. As the grade-inflated bastions of higher learning say to pretty much anyone who hands them a check and keeps his mouth shut about liking America, “Pass.”

Plus he's in rare form!

The quarter million dollar academic vacation model is economically unsustainable and poisonous to our culture. The world of Animal House was a lot more fun when it didn’t mean preemptive bankruptcy for its graduates and the fostering of a tyrannical training ground for future libfascists. It’s time to get all Bluto on the obsolete boil that is academia; time to give it a squeeze.

Yes, and seven years of college down the drain. It's too much for Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, formerly a youngish president of Midland University, and he's got a new book, The Vanishing American Adult, that's unsparing on the clueless snowflakes.  Ultimately, one produces adults by educating for civilization.

The parents who are aware that their children are being coddled and do not know the value of hard work are working against the prevailing culture when they try to address these issues. Sasse repeatedly notes that this book is not a plea to change public policy. It is conservative in the same way that Sasse is. It is a plan to change the culture from the bottom up instead of the top down.

It would be easier if the Zeitgeist, at least as implemented by the Democrat-Academic-Entertainment Complex, wasn't working against such parents.

He tells American parents to raise their children “as if they’ll rule someday.” Imagine yourself as Aristotle tutoring Alexander the Great or as a nanny training a future princess. “The sustenance of this free republic requires an egalitarian vision that all of us are fit to rule . . . making informed judgments about to whom ‘we the people’ delegate the daily business of governing and deciding,” he writes. “Otherwise this historically unique experiment in self-government will have run its course.” The stakes, in other words, could not be higher. And we are lucky to have someone like Ben Sasse in Washington helping to define them.

Perhaps, though, in the same way that parents can reclaim the culture one (home-schooled?) child at a time, the faculty can reclaim the curriculum, one clueless student inquiry at a time.  And the cluelessness is rampant.  I had to get this post written before the bookmark file got clogged.  Start a month ago with "Can't or Won't?"

We might provide the most detailed of written and oral instructions, but students will still find a reason, an occasion or excuse, to challenge those instructions as inadequate to their needs and (attempt to) shift the responsibility of the work from them to us.

It becomes like a game of tennis, this batting around of responsibility. We serve an assignment over the net with clear guidelines and expectations, and they either let the ball drop, claiming they somehow weren’t prepared (I didn’t know … You never told me … The assignment sheet didn’t say …) or they question whether the ball was even fair in the first place (Too long! Too hard! Hey, out of bounds!).

We then serve it again, and again, to our great fatigue, but perhaps resolve that next time we won’t bother to serve at all. Maybe next time, we think, we’ll just hand the ball to the students and thereby absolve them of actual effort. We’ll put the students in charge of the game; we’ll forfeit, give up.

Which is probably just what many of them are angling for.

Yet that is not necessarily because they lack academic ability -- although that may be true as well at the community college level -- but because they lack academic agency, it seems. They are unable or unwilling to recognize their own role in developing college skills, in earning a college education.

And perhaps continued tight budgets will focus the administrative mind on the legions of enablers and coddlers who trade under the rubric of student services.

I want to point out that at my college, and many others, there has been an institutional acknowledgment of the helplessness of students. We now have courses at my college, under the label of “student success,” that are designed to teach (and award college-level academic credit for) things such as time management and a sense of self-awareness.

While I certainly value such skills and traits, and hope that my students have them or develop them over time, the very existence of such classes lends credence to the proposition that students lack these basic elements of young adulthood when entering college.

Furthermore, my college has recently approved a proposal (brought by a student group to the Faculty Senate) that both acknowledges and legitimizes our students’ demands of having access to instructors 24/7. We instructors must now include a pledge in our course syllabi to respond to student emails within 24 hours and to return all graded work (with feedback) in seven days. It seems our campus is formally affirming the danger I spoke of earlier: the shifting of more responsibilities from students to instructors.

So what do we, as instructors, do in the helplessness culture? Do we capitulate to students, ask ever and ever less, and respond to emails and provide instructions in increasingly redundant ways? Or do we stand and fight the battle for instilling in our students the kind of accountability, autonomy and self-awareness our institutions tout? To do the former, in my opinion, only degrades academe; to do the latter risks the wrath of both students and administration.

The professor's job is to say No and uphold standards. Let the students deal with that. The faculty are the stewards of the university. Let the administration deal with that.  Perhaps Penn State's Patty Kleban (via The College Fix) is beginning to figure it out.

College is supposed to be hard. It is not a guarantee. Faculty members work hard to set up fair and objective assignments that prepare students for jobs or grad school after college. Sometimes the process of following directions or due dates or including sub-headings are part of the learning objectives.

Put that in your course outline someplace, and keep the supposedly required boilerplate that goes beyond the schedule of topics and examinations to a minimum. And hold the line on "read and understand."

And give Kurt Schlichter some assistance squeezing the infected boil that is the administration.

EVALUATING THE CASE. Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel columnist Patrick McIlheran suggests it's wasteful to spend money speeding up passenger trains.

States already have submitted plans for more than $100 billion in train projects. And a private group favoring high-speed rail released a study this summer of what genuine bullet trains on one route would cost. Answer: Gulp.

Because what governors are planning isn't high-speed rail. The Midwest plan is for diesel trains that can go up to 110 mph, about what steam locomotives did across Wisconsin in the 1930s. Nice, but train backers point out that's mere normal speed in Europe or Japan. "I am shocked by the timidness of America," Andy Kunz, head of the U.S. High Speed Rail Association, told a newspaper.

In presenting the arguments that way, the columnist limits the policy options. Yes, European high-speed is faster. It's also more expensive. At the margin, a restoration of the 1938 timetables ("Speeding Up The Rails") might suffice to divert traffic from the roads and the airways to make the project worthwhile. A much faster service provides very little in the way of reduced running times, particularly on the shorter than end-to-end journeys that are passenger rail's greatest strength. ("Reliability More Important Than Rapidity") That steam locomotives could achieve such timings ("Applied Hiawatha Research") on jointed rail protected by semaphore signals also suggests the current regulations governing signalling and track structure are excessive. On the other hand, freight railroads operating long freight trains without cabooses also see advantages in positive train control systems that let crews know exactly where the tail end of a stopped train is, suggesting possibilities for strengthening the railroad network.

If you really want to lure riders, say backers, trains ought to exceed 200 mph. The Midwest High Speed Rail Association hired engineers to cost out such a line linking St. Louis to Chicago. Like high-speed rail in Europe, it would use a dedicated line - no freight mixing with light, fast trains. It would bypass towns and have no road crossings. It would be electric.

And it would cost $11.5 billion. That's one 305-mile line. Did you want to go somewhere else, too?

The association, which sees this as a reasonable price to replace a 65-minute flight with a two-hour ride, isn't overestimating. At $38 million a mile, it's on the low end of what the Government Accountability Office guessed. Assume a similar price in denser southeastern Wisconsin, and this implies that real high-speed rail from Milwaukee to Madison would cost $2.6 billion. Chicago-Minneapolis would be $15 billion.

The airlines dissipate all the time advantage of a 550 mph jet over even a 100 mph train by checking passengers through security, loading and unloading through one door, diverting or delaying when a thunderstorm moves through, and setting passengers down at some distance from their destination. Railroad stations exist in central business districts and have a relatively small footprint near office parks.

Yes, well, freeways cost a fortune, too: The state's twice-a-century rebuild of I-94 southward is $2 billion.

But freeways carry many more people. Even in the European Union, rife with 200-mph trains and $5-a-gallon gas, cars carry 76% of passenger travel, trains 5.8%. That's down from 8% since 1980, even as Europe built irresistible trains. Cars' share is up.

Air, bus, and rail do compete for a relatively small share of total passenger miles. The way in which these modes compete is in providing relatively cheap additions to capacity, compared to the cost of providing sufficient roads to replace the trains and planes. A fast train is an expensive way to get to the grocer or the day-care, errands that account for some of those automotive passenger miles. On the other hand, providing additional expressway, arterial, and parking capacity in Chicago or London or Tokyo to provide for the intercity and commuter rail passengers would be more expensive than finding additional capacity on the existing tracks. On the weekend, some of the British I talked with described efforts in London and Paris and other European cities to discourage driving into the city and encourage rail use. Chicago, without any special legislation, experiences the same effect by market pricing of downtown parking and a reluctance to build new expressways. A lot of drivers shift to Metra and the Transit Authority.

And freeways bring in paying customers. Cars pay more in fuel and other taxes than is spent on building and keeping highways. The feds reckoned in 2004 that for every 1,000 miles traveled, cars paid $1.79 more in taxes than their roads consumed in public money.

Passenger trains took in $210 of net subsidy for every 1,000 passenger miles, that report found. While air-travel taxes, other economists say, cover the costs of airports and traffic control, fares don't cover trains' operating costs, much less the cost of tracks.

That's why costly roads differ from costly rails. "The users of (roads) willingly pay the capital costs as well as the operating costs," said transportation scholar Bob Poole of the nonpartisan Reason Foundation. "That just makes them a different category."

Fundamentally, road and air infrastructure is funded by taxes on road and air travelers. Rail infrastructure is funded by taxes on road travelers. Non-users pay in a way they don't for roads.

Not quite. Read the report. (Page 13)

The estimates in this report include net federal subsidies to passenger transportation for highway, air, transit, and intercity railroad transportation. Subsidies to passenger transportation by state and local government are not included. The data for highway are further subdivided into net federal subsidies to autos, motorcycles, pickups and vans; school buses; transit buses; and intercity buses. Subsidies to air transportation are also presented separately for commercial air carriers and general aviation.

Without the counties and the municipalities maintaining the side streets out of general tax revenues, drivers have a more difficult journey to the roads that receive federal matching funds (roads that they share with trucks, "It's Corporate Welfare".) Some cost estimates can be done on an incremental cost basis, others require allocation of common or joint costs. Yes, improvements in the rail network are costly. It does not have to follow that improvements in the road network are cost-effective, or that the current allocation of resources to transportation infrastructure is efficient.

WELL, WHY NOT?

Straight from the horse's mouth, er, sorry, Wilbur, Minding the Campus contributor Dr. Ed.  "In its infinite wisdom, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has decreed that individuals with 'severe intellectual disability' can now attend all state colleges and universities, including UMass Amherst."  That's "severe intellectual disability" as a term that the less-politically-correct editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used to refer to less euphemistically.

Call the people in charge of ZooMass surrendering with another shrug.  "For a long time, Cold Spring Shops has called attention to the folly of admitting unprepared students and calling it access."