Students Unable to Write, Universities Offer Remedial Classes
A significant percentage of American college students have to take remedial writing classes. From elementary school on up, the American education system is a catastrophic failure at educating young people.
I know a teacher whose students in high school English at a charter school find it almost impossible to finish reading a three-page short story—and as for understanding and writing about the short story, forget it. At my college, there were students every year who had to do remedial writing. The education system is failing our children.
Americans can’t do math and they can’t write, and taxpayers are funding this crisis. Our education and communication skills are going to hell in a handbasket, and it’s going to be a serious problem going forward for society at large.
“[CampusReform, Sept. 7] K-12 public education has failed to prepare incoming college students how to write at the public level.
In a desperate attempt to catch high school graduates up to speed, many universities are providing remedial writing classes to college students.
About 68% of those starting at two-year public institutions and 40% of students enrolled in public four-year universities took at least one remedial writing class between 2003 to 2009, according to an original report from the Department of Education.
Average math and reading test scores dropped significantly from 2019 to 2021, according to a 2022 study by two Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA). It seems likely that the 2016 figures would be much worse if they were resampled in 2023, after the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Campus Reform also noted how this ignorance of writing is affecting the business sector: “Businesses are also shelling out billions to offer employees remedial writing classes.”
This emphasizes what I said above, that it’s a problem not just for colleges, but for every employer who hires a college graduate or even a high school graduate. We are raising ignorant, incompetent young people, and that has far-reaching consequences.
We are encouraging the world, particularly Asia, to enroll in our universities and colleges. Students from these countries have even less skill in the spoken, read, written, English language. The CCP generously supports these students to attend American universities, and for as long as they wish, taking, for example, seven years to earn a Ph.D. after the M.A. This also affects how much content, the sophistication of the lectures, and what can be required in terms of background of our doctoral students. (I have taught Ph.D. students in the Humanities for the past fifty years and recently retired because I thought this was such a serious problem.)