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.