[ang_cire]

I think because if their graduation requires them to pass that course (and it's a freshman-level course), the university is basically facing a choice of, "teach them this thing", "change graduation requirements", or "either kick the kids out or willfully let them waste 4 years just to not be able to graduate".

Both the latter 2 are big choices for a university administration to make, so it's much easier to ask the professors to make up the difference. That's why it's the faculty and not the admin demanding this; they know what the admins are asking them to do is impossible.

[isityettime]

tl;dr: remedial classes are good and some schools are good at them. Admissions question aside, it's not a bad idea to get good at them.

I attended community college in my hometown, as well as a university elsewhere, and eventually completed my undergraduate education.

While I attended the community college, which openly advertises that it has no admissions requirements at all, I also worked there as a tutor in math. Since it had no entry requirements, the school had decent placement tests and a pretty damn comprehensive suite of remedial math courses. Some of the students I tutored were studying arithmetic (negative numbers, exponentiation), and some were even practicing how to pronounce and write out numbers by name in English and map those to Arabic numerals. There was no amount of ignorance that could make you unteachable there, as far as I could tell; you just had to find the right course.

Their math classes also included stuff you'd normally take at a university: when I was there, I took first-order logic, differential and integral calculus, vector calculus, systems of differential equations, statistics, discrete math, and probably some others I didn't take or forgot about. Some of those courses I had to retake at university anyway because of transfer credit limits and things like that, and in some of those cases, the community college version was actually better anyway (the university ones were fine).

I think it's awesome that the school had really weak admissions and really strong placement, and that it can take an earnest and reasonably intelligent high school dropout from the basics they missed all the way to being ready to dive into upper-division, in-major courses in STEM at a university.

It seems like that's an unspoken possibility for universities, too. Round out the catalogue, beef up placement exam regimes, further partnerships with local community colleges, lean into early exams and pre-tests within courses, and when students prove to be really unprepared, direct them to an appropriate class. It's not a matter of "waste 4 years just to not be able to graduate", it's "okay, it's going to take you longer to graduate because you have to take this detour in this subject area, so here's what your path now looks like". And of course dropping out or trying and failing are still (painful! expensive!) options, as they always were.

I'm not saying this is easy or cheap or a responsibility I expect universities to want. But "teach students the thing" can be a much saner option than the article seems to describe, which is hijacking existing courses that are purportedly focused on something else in order to teach their prerequisites inline.

[ang_cire]

To be clear, I never endorsed any of these routes. They're all bandaids that try to make up for the intentional defunding and prisonification of our public school system.

We can't solve the intentional sabotage of our educational system by keeping kids in it for longer via remedial classes, which are supposed to be focused on kids who have personal barriers to learning, not systemically-imposed ones.

[isityettime]

Since I wrote that post I've learned a little more about other solutions being experimented with elsewhere, and I think offering remedial support is important but I have a clearer picture of the problems with traditional remedial course progressions and where the attrition actually happens (it turns out it's in between the remedial courses, not in the courses themselves). I think there are some ways forward that somewhat solve that attrition issue without lowering the bar.

And I agree that the correct fix to bad primary and secondary school learning outcomes has to be focused on the school and home environments of students in primary and secondary school. I also think the current structure of higher education (a service you buy, at great cost, typically with non-dischargeable debt) makes detours (like remedial course sequences or just failing to place into a course for a given semester) and failed experiments (getting admitted to a school or program you're just not ready for) extremely costly and high-stakes for students.

Issues crop up here in university classrooms and university admissions offices, but it's obvious that the problem's root is nowhere near there.

I kinda wanna contest one thing, though: the function of college degrees in the job market is a credential that signals, among other things, a competence floor. "Keeping" people (virtually always adults, by the time the enter university) longer should be minimized where it doesn't produce more competence (something that cannot be measured by completion rates). But if efforts to shorten that path achieve that goal by diluting the accuracy of the credential as a competency signal, downstream consumers of that signal will just stop relying on it. That's what is happening here with universities bringing back the use of the SAT in the face of the competency signaling failure of high school diplomas, and it can also happen with community college transfer credits, associate's degrees, or bachelor's degrees. And when the problem hits the job market, employers are likely to turn even more to that diffuse set of signals (personal networks, clubs, vibes that draw on stereotypes, legacy networks, credentials that take even more schooling) that are actually worse in equity terms because they are more informal, more path-dependent, and harder to crack for skilled and talented people of disadvantaged backgrounds.

It's true that sometimes employers or universities or others are looking for largely arbitrary filters, because they have more qualified candidates available than they actually can deal with, in which case the function of a college degree or a high school may no longer be primarily about signaling a competency floor. I think that case is even worse, though. Consider the case of universities: instead of buying test prep or subject area tutoring, high SES families end up seeking to reproduce their advantage through favors, legacy networks, interview coaching, application coaching, etc.

Degrading the competency signals of educational credentials creates a cascading fraudulent promotion failure. Degrading or eliminating the aptitude signals of quantitative entrance tests ends up burdening the people who are supposed to be helped with not just failure and detours but massive debt. You can't solve scarcity problems by removing information.

Thanks for your engagement and sorry for writing too much. :)