Only 37 percent of 12th graders tested proficient in reading and only 25 percent in maths. Yet the inability to read or do maths seems to be no barrier to college. Unprepared students are flooding into college in record numbers. The Bureau of Labour Statistics says 70 percent of white high-school graduates and 58 percent of black graduates in 2016 enrolled in college. In his syndicated column, Walter E. Williams asks, “If only 37 percent of white high school graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are admitting 70 percent of them? And if roughly 17 percent of black high school graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are admitting 58 percent of them? It’s inconceivable that college administrators are unaware that they are admitting students who are ill-prepared and cannot perform at the college level.”
John Leo on standards versus appearances. One of these.
Collage and University is no longer a place of higher learning. It is a BUSINESS!!!!! The more warm bums in seats the more money they make and the Teachers (sic) are kept on staff at the high rate of pay and of course that long sought after tenure. Steve O
Your usage suggests that you failed 6th grade.
Huh, please explain. Steve’s post seems to be quite accurate and makes an excellent point.
Mack’s piles are most likely bothering him this morning and he probably didn’t get any to boot.
Hello? “Collage”?
col·lage
[kəˈläZH]
NOUN
a piece of art made by sticking various different materials such as photographs and pieces of paper or fabric on to a backing.
the art of making collages.
a combination or collection of various things.
Now college is a different thing.
@Rob B – Good point, now regarding Mack’s “Collage and University ‘is’ no longer a place of higher learning”, you left out that it should be ‘are’, not ‘is’.
Example. A dog and cat ‘are’ animals. Not ‘is’ animals.
Or “College and university ‘are’ no longer ‘places’ of higher learning.
We language police must always be on our guard. For the sake of civilization.
Grammar isn’t everything. Look at Donald Trump. We know his grammar is lacking, but he is very good delivering a message. It’s the people with skilled trades and not-so-great-grammar that are currently making all the money and buying all the new cars and trucks and homes. Think about that whilst you pour your next Grande for a working man on a coffee break.
Is Big Education just a scam? Employers are looking for individuals with skills sets that fit the employer’s needs. Lacking the necessary skills may get you a mountain of school debt. It will not keep you employed in college level position.
It IS a Business in this country and in the US. Fees Charged for out of country students (3-4 X what Canadians Pay), along with the millions that the Humanities brings in keeps all those Communist Profs well paid and secure in their “tenure”.
However…low grades will not secure anyone a spot in Canada…unless its a Match book “University”.
That High School Kids graduating with little grammar, English & Math skills can be laid directly at the feet of the Politically Correct Socialist altar. No one FAILS – ZERO’s not allowed. (wouldn’t want to hurt their precious feelings now would we..??). Abject Socialist BS by your Far left Curriculums across the land….Add to that mandatory Gender neutrality – Sex Ed Deviance classes and you got a bunch of useless Eloi..
The Money is in the Trades – that is, as long as we retain some manufacturing / heavy industry here. University puts out thousands of Barista’s with an Arts Degree that cannot add single digits in their Safe spaced heads. – Future Welfare Recipients.
Hate to say it, but Canada has NEVER gone through what the US has over the centuries – STRIFE. To our Detriment….And it shows. One look at the ASShat of our Efette Diletante of a PM is proof enough.
Love the ‘Eloi’ reference. I often draw that comparison.
I spent several years on both sides in the post-secondary educational system. The idea that it’s a meritocracy and that one can succeed purely through talent and hard work is just that–an idea.
What was described in the URL is nothing new to me. While I taught at a post-secondary institution, I had students who were deficient in basic math skills, though i noticed that nearly 40 years ago when I was a teaching assistant during my first round of grad studies.
Yet, despite their basic lack of abilities in certain key areas, I was expected to not only pass those same students but to spend my time, preferably outside of my required lecture periods, in order to teach them what they should have known before they started my course. If that course had a pre-requisite, often those instructors never felt any obligation to properly prepare those students. (There was a lot of that “kick the can down the road” mentality at my institution.) The policy was not to necessarily teach everything in the course outline but to teach some of it well.
Imagine taking driving lessons in which one didn’t need to know everything about how to operate a motor vehicle, just as long as one was good at what one did learn. One can steer well but be lousy at using signal lights or one could be proficient at stepping on the gas pedal but never learned that there are such things as brakes. That’s what I had to put up with.
Enduring such idiocies was one reason I quit after more than 10 years. I’ve got lots more stories I could tell, but I think you get the picture.
Math, science, reading writing – you’re all so passé.
I mean, how about some positive stuff: Ontario elementary school students are absolutely precocious when it comes to knowledge about buggery, sheep-shagging, and peckerotomies.
And they’ve got the STD’s to prove it!
It seems that college, university education apart from engineering and such, is a money making enterprise for those that graduated from it and have no prospect of being employed in actual wealth producing enterprise.
Those that got degrees in social and other such studies have no other skills but staying at school and getting others to pay their way into nothingness. The world probably needs one or two of those. You get more and the world is going downhill from there.
They write books that nobody reads, studies that nobody studies (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/science/many-social-science-findings-not-as-strong-as-claimed-study-says.html) and yap a lot to justify their existence.
For all that nothingness they need students, any students with cold hard cash, to pay their way.
Then they teach them how free enterprise is enslaving those deplorable that work for living to generate the wealth that they themselves surely deserve much more.
“students who are ill-prepared and cannot perform at the college level.”
They should be able to perform at today’s college ‘level’. It’s dumbed-down like everything else … besides, how smart do you need to be to excel the idiotic world of ‘gender studies’, ‘native Indian ‘studies’, Black American ‘Studies’ and my personal fave, the ‘why are so many lesbians so fat studies.’ …. etc.
Who cares if they can earn a living after they are tired of the series of Soros and Democrat paid protests and barista work. Angry, deeply in debted, hateful, resentful and envious young people are very useful to the left as they always have been,
All that is necessary for the highest paid $$$ government jobs is a college degree. Facilitating the completion of such degrees is all the redistribution necessary. Cause all you smarty pants white folk who have been makin all da money ares gonna PAY! We’s takin yours jobs! And yur taxes to boot. An we be making the Constitution into what we wants. Ain’t no longer gonna be a racist or a merititious document.
Thanks colleges! Fergitten uz paidt!
They can keep a brain alive in a petri dish but not in a grade 6 classroom. That is the difference between a scientist and a teacher.
Young People are over paying for the “privilege” of failing, or getting worthless college degrees and a MOUNTAIN of DEBT. Non-Dischargeable debt. You cannot get rid of it, even in bankruptcy.
College Tuition is one of the fastest rising costs. It has been for the last twenty years. It is more of a scam and a racket than a path to success for way too many people.
Learning is a lifelong thing and all of it need not come from an institution (Especially if its a penitentiary!) although I would prefer to deal only with doctors and engineers that have come from creditable places. As for social engineers, they can cram it in their cram-holes. I am sick and tired of subsidizing some fat misandrist who claims I am a misogynist because she couldn’t get a spring bear to eat her if she took a honey bath let alone get a man to put his Johnson in her lake; or some pip-cleaner-armed, muffin-top kid with a reverse mullet haircut and way-too-tight jeans who couldn’t use a shovel if he had to dig for his life telling us (Holy run-on sentences, Batman!) we need to check our white privilege. Judging groups is usually unfair to any individual within. In the cases of “higher” learning for many, not all, social studies is the exception.
The uni system has expanded far beyond it’s usefulness. One day market forces will bring change.
All the useless studies degrees – it’s nothing more than grade 10,11,12,13,14,15….
The UA has had remedial reading on campus for years.
Schools are puppy mills/baby-minding centres and colleges are finishing schools.
If people were truly serious about education and training, we would see cram schools (as one sees in Asia) and more apprentice programs.
Puppy mills indeed! Breeding some sick puppies.
Useless puppies, really.
We must remember the the purpose of universities is no longer to provide an education but to indoctrinate the young into the new orthodoxy of neo communist thinking. That is always easier to do when the students are not all that bright and it’s even more important that they get as many young people as possible. A generation of foot soldiers for the new left.
I have taught at several universities in the USA. I estimate at least 50% of the students either don’t have the interest or the ability to to properly learn the subjects. It’s an incredible waste of resources.