Congratulations! You're About to Fail

Yes, these students have the required credentials. But they don't have the skills. They won't comprehend what they read in college well enough to jump into classroom discussions. They can't write analytically. They'll find college-level math over their heads. The California State University system this year required 58% of its freshmen to take remedial classes in math or writing or both, while acknowledging that such classes do a lousy job of helping laggards catch up. In fact, those who take one remedial class are twice as likely to drop out of school, and those who take two rarely finish.

Free and open to all, the public school system tricks students into believing they've been well educated, then shoves them into higher education, where learning is rationed by cost and capacity. And despite the decades-long effort to beef up academic demands and the tens of billions of dollars spent to open college doors to students who can't pay on their own, the percentage of U.S. college students who eventually earn degrees has been about the same since the 1970s.

Over the same period, the nation's economy, demographics and international competition have become more hostile to the ill-prepared. The sort of manufacturing jobs that can support a family are rapidly being outsourced overseas. The 14 million white-collar jobs that retiring baby boomers are leaving require more college education than the potential candidates for those jobs -- who are, increasingly, Latino and African American -- have to offer, according to an analysis by economist Anthony Carnevale that has pedagogues chattering.

Margaret Orr, a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College, says of the college dropout rate: "If all of our high schools performed at that level, we'd be up in arms." Advocates with the Boston-based Jobs for the Future argue that the nation needs to double the number of low-income high school graduates who earn a college degree. Doing so, the group says, would add several hundred billion dollars to the nation's economic output and tens of billions in tax revenues.

Meanwhile, the media play on the shock value of $30,000 or $40,000 tuition bills, perhaps because the colleges that charge that much are the places that journalists would like to see their kids attend, if only they could afford it. So articles and broadcasts smirk at the millions of dollars colleges spend on climbing walls and hot tubs large enough to host a Western Civ class. They ponder the meaning of the battle over affirmative action. But those issues affect but a thin slice of the college-going population, those who attend the 10% to 20% of colleges that cherry-pick from a wealthy, well-qualified crop. The much bigger societal problem of too few students graduating from any college, two- or four-year, receives little ink or air time.