Unready or not, they're going to college

Only a third of 12th-graders were ready for college-level math or reading in 2024, according to the Nation's Report Card. Yet 53 percent said they'd been accepted at a four-year college.

Fewer students are heading to community college, more to four-year schools, compared to 2019, writes Jaryn Crouson for the Daily Caller. Many aren't prepared, but that doesn't seem to matter.

ACT reports that 30 percent of the Class of 2025 meets at least three of four readiness benchmarks in English, math, reading and science, and 20 percent met all four. The benchmarks predict a 50 percent chance of a B or better and a 75 percent chance of a C or better in entry-level courses.

I posted yesterday about the shocking University of California San Diego faculty-staff report on the "steep decline" in students' math and literacy skills.

Basically, in 2020, the University of California Regents admissions would not consider SAT or ACT scores, ignoring the recommendations of faculty. Grade inflation went wild during remote learning and standards nosedived. When everybody has an "A" average and nobody is allowed to submit a test score, you end up with freshmen who passed Algebra I, Geometry and Algebra II, often Pre-Calculus and sometimes Calculus, but can't add fractions.

UCSD, more than Berkeley or UCLA, took seriously the directive to admit students who had high GPAs at schools with lots of low-income and immigrant students. These students were more likely to be placed in low-level remedial math, but they weren't the only ones.

Several years ago, I signed up to mentor a student at a high-poverty, high-minority school. She was one of the best students in the school, earning excellent grades, but told me her SAT scores were very low. She took a free prep class and tried again, but didn't improve. She tried the ACT, but again got a low score.

She told me that she couldn't write. I helped her with college essays and discovered she was correct: Her writing was incoherent. She also worried that she was unprepared for college math. She'd received an "A" in Algebra II, but said she'd learning nothing. The class never had a "real teacher" and the substitute "didn't teach us anything." She signed up for Pre-Calculus in 12th-grade, but it was canceled for lack of a teacher.

She got into two University of California schools because of her grades, but decided to go to community college. She worried that she'd fail -- even at community college -- and didn't want to waste her parents' money. I was supposed to get her to "aim high," but I thought her fears were justified. All those "A" grades on her report card had set her up to fail.

I'm still angry about it. Yes, there are students who drift through school not working very hard, and students who wouldn't succeed in college even if they'd done the work. This girl should be a college graduate by now, and I'm fairly sure she's not.