The N&O has a story on the academic boot camp run for soldiers and Marines by Coastal Carolina Community College. UNC president Erskine Bowles wants to see programs like it replicated at UNC campuses in order to reduce the need for remedial classes for incoming students.
It’s good to see the admission that UNC schools (many others, too) are admitting students who are poorly equipped to do college work. Makes all the cheerleading about the great strides our K-12 schools are supposedly making look pretty doubtful.
The unanswered question about all kinds of remedial courses is how well they actually work. Is it possible to take a young person with considerable academic deficits in the basics owing to years of neglect in his K-12 years, have him take a single course in remedial English or math, and then say, “Problem solved! We have the kid ready!”? Sometimes that might happen. Sometimes, however, the student may pass the remedial course and still be very weak in academic skills.
The story quotes an administrator at App State as saying, “I think it’s a myth that our programmatic interventions are going to make huge gains.” It would be a good piece of research to find out if professors in English 101 classes think that students who came through remedial English are really prepared.
There is another problem. Are students who need remedial classes to get into middling UNC campuses really doing the wisest thing if they enroll in college? As I argued in my “Overselling of Higher Education” paper, a lot of college graduates these days end up in low-paying jobs that any reasonably intelligent high school student could learn to do. Perhaps the last part of the “boot camp” should be to show the campers that there are good job prospects for people who haven’t gotten college degrees.
