EDUCATION SO INCLUSIVE NOBODY LEARNS ANYTHING.

I'm reusing an old post title and revisiting an old argument.  "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."

Conditions have not gotten any better in sixteen years.  Recently, collegians having trouble with 7+2 = x+6, which can be posed as a first grade arithmetic problem by replacing "solve for x" with "fill in the box" came to our attention.  Dear reader, even the house organ for business as usual in higher education was troubled.  "A ‘Steep Decline’ in Students’ Academic Preparation at UC-San Diego Struck a Nerve."

That decline is concentrating minds on the faculty.

Over the past five years, the report said, the number of incoming students whose math skills fall below middle-school standards increased nearly thirtyfold — representing roughly one in eight freshmen — despite the fact that they had strong high-school grades.

Two out of five students with “severe deficiencies” in math also needed “remedial writing instruction” and were required to take additional writing courses to reach the high-school graduate level, the report found.

“Admitting large numbers of students who are profoundly underprepared risks harming the very students we hope to support, by setting them up for failure,” the faculty group wrote in the report. “Especially now, when our resources become more constrained, we cannot take on more remedial education than we can responsibly and effectively deliver.”

The findings prompted academics and others to weigh in on students’ preparation for college-level work. For some, the report highlighted the potential consequences of eliminating standardized-testing requirements and the challenges of serving more students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The faculty might be attempting to temper principle with practicality, but admitting unprepared students and calling it access is not going to turn out well.  "[H]eroic 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."

Predictably, San Diego's senior administrators blame the aftereffects of the corona tyranny and suggest there is a tradeoff between equity and excellence.

Many of those students have arrived less academically prepared than their peers, the report said.

That disparity became particularly acute during the pandemic, Renick said. “For students who came from well-resourced high schools and tended to end up at elite institutions, there was very little trackable drop-off in how they performed once they got to college,” he said. “But for low-income students, first-generation students, students from minority backgrounds … the impacts were much more extreme.”

The report highlights a fundamental tension: If colleges that expand access to underserved students don’t have the capacity to adequately support them, are they setting up those students, and themselves, for failure?

I have never been a fan of that "nontraditional" or "first-generation" implying deficient academic preparation: that's a failure either of the schools those matriculants attended or of the broader culture for not inculcating bourgeois norms.

Marginal Revolution's Alex Tabarrok provides a link to the San Diego faculty report and asks a pertinent question.  "The report exposes a hard truth: expanding access without preserving standards risks the very idea of a higher education. Can the cultivation of excellence survive an egalitarian world?"

It might be better to ask, "Is an egalitarian world an experiment against reality?"  Pajamas Media's Catherine Salgado takes it from there.

The brutal reality is that if you need any remedial classes, you should not be in college. Higher education should not be working to bring in as many people as possible, regardless of their intelligence or work ethic. It should be reserved for the few who can meet the standards. Part of the problem is that now in America we require college degrees for many jobs that simply should not require them, including journalism, business, management, and elementary school teaching. That also needs correction.

But ultimately, UCSD is setting up its students for failure in life, and bringing down the quality of its graduates by allowing in and pandering to large numbers of students who simply can’t hack it. I knew a couple such kids in college, and when they left college, they could not handle the real world and jobs that didn’t offer endless extensions and remedial training. If they hadn’t been nursed along on false expectations in college, they probably could have held jobs successfully.

In sum, there are students so clueless they don't even know they're clueless.  "Today's students will earn 8% less (but won't know how much that is)."

Predictably, the house organ for all wokeness, all the time in higher education's reaction to grim news out of San Diego is to highlight an older column, "It’s Not Them: It’s You."  Meaning?  "Rather than fixating on students’ supposed deficiencies, professors should recommit to core principles for learning."

The column is not as bad as that introduction, but nowhere, dear reader, does it call for professors saying no and upholding standards.