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by butterlettuce 444 days ago
> It also seems wrong to me that these kids are accepted in to the university to begin with.

Free revenue for universities. Also, when your high school counselors, teachers, and administrators tell you to apply to college or else, this is what you get. When you convince employers to require degrees for middle class wages, this is what you get.

If these professors don't want to deal with illiterate kids, they should put the blame on the group that didn't prepare kids for college while telling them to apply anyway.
3 comments
jack_h 444 days ago
> Free revenue for universities.

Many years ago when I went to university my state created a fund to pay a certain portion of a student's credit hours. This was implemented in my second or third year from what I remember. I noticed that my direct out of pocket cost (or really how large the loan I took out was) never went down from before this program and after. The university was pretty flush with funding though.

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ecshafer 444 days ago
This is exactly what happened in the US with the federal grants and loans. Universities just raised their prices.
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bilbo0s 444 days ago
Goes kind of deeper than that though.

How is a college realistically supposed to reject a guy with a clearly qualifying 28 or 29 on the ACT? You're going to have to give a helluv-an explanation for that, because I can guarantee, you do that to too many kids and the politicians are gonna come after you.

The problem is enormous. That kids can pass these entrance exams without being truly literate is what makes this issue so intractable.

To me, the only politically and socially acceptable option is to fail them in their college coursework. We don't do that though. Most students live by the "curve".

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butterlettuce 444 days ago
Lots of brilliant kids get rejected with great ACT/SAT scores from elite universities, but they look down on those that lack "extracurricular" activities. Simple as that. It pissed me off when I realized that elite colleges would choose a football player over somebody that studied their butt off and did well in AP courses.
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bilbo0s 444 days ago
Well, that's the other half of the problem. Or the other edge of the sword of easy entrance exams. You get literally tens of thousands of kids that can get that 35 or 36 on the ACT. If you throw in the kids with the 34's it's even more ridiculous. And Harvard has maybe 2000 spots. (But probably not.)

The exams are just not providing enough separation.

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marcosdumay 444 days ago
> When you convince employers to require degrees for middle class wages, this is what you get.

Yes, that.

Also how did this happen?

And also, middle-school (high-school? what is it called on the US?) children are supposed to be able to read a small text and understand it too. This is one of those things everybody should be able to do, and employers have good reasons to require.

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