CALIFORNIA
FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2017, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“CSU GRADUATES MORE, HOPES TO MAINTAIN DEGREES’ VALUE”
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2017, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“CSU GRADUATES MORE, HOPES TO MAINTAIN DEGREES’ VALUE”
Every economic forecast shows
California needs more college graduates. About 35 percent more than today’s
total by 2030, on pain of losing hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs to
other states and countries.
The state’s largest producer of
college grads has gotten the message: The Cal State system last spring
graduated 23 percent of all students who enrolled four years earlier, its
highest proportion of four-year graduations ever. At the same time, the more
than 98,700 undergraduate degrees handed out were the most since the CSU system
began in 1857 at San Jose State University.
But almost everyone at the 23 Cal
State campuses knows it’s not enough. The state needs more CSU products, not
merely to replace the host of schoolteachers due to retire in the next few
years, but also to fuel new Googles and Hulus and Facebooks that are almost
certain to create thousands of jobs over the next few decades.
Cal State thinks it knows where to
find those new graduates: among the many freshmen who arrive on campus needing
remedial education in English and math. University officials report about 40
percent of students now take remedial courses because they’re not fully
college-ready. Those courses have not previously offered credit toward
graduation, so remedial students drop out or graduate late in larger numbers than
their classmates.
The CSU, under orders from system
Chancellor Timothy P. White, thinks it has a way around that problem, one that
will give students college credit even for classes covering what they should
have learned in high school.
It’s called “corequisite remediation.”
The concept allows students to take regular college classes even as they’re
struggling to catch up to where they should have been before ever enrolling.
“These classes will be different from
campus to campus,” said CSU spokesman Mike Uhlenkamp. “Each campus serves a
different population. We know the current remedial classes have helped, but
they’re not doing enough for the students. So there will be a radical sea
change.” This will start next fall, except on two campuses (Monterey Bay and
Sonoma State) where there’s a one-year delay.
Some professors complain the new
classes are being imposed from outside, although they are actually being
designed by faculty at each campus.
They’ll all be based in part on the
experience of the City University of New York and Tennessee’s 13 junior
colleges.
In the new system, students might
spend the first seven weeks of a statistics class learning algebra and
probability, and the last seven in a 14-week semester completing the coursework
of a normal class. An alternate plan could see students study both algebra and
statistics simultaneously, even though algebra is needed to understand much of
statistics.
It may be hard to see how this can
work without confusing students, but the CSU insists it can and will work. A
study published by Columbia University says it has worked in Tennessee. “Based
on the Tennessee data, the success rates from corequisite remediation indicate
a more efficient instructional system for students who enter college academically
underprepared,” concluded that study.
The CUNY experience is similar,
according to a 2016 report finding that “policies allowing students to take
college-level instead of remedial…courses can increase student success.”
No one knows what employers will think
of this or whether it will eventually devalue all Cal State degrees. Until now,
employers have had a good idea of what students with each type of degree should
know; at least for a while to come, they may not be so sure. That could harm
students who need no remedial work after entering college.
Said Uhlenkamp, “Our overarching goal
is to strengthen the quality of a Cal State education and we are confident our
faculty will design courses that do this.”
But some Cal State professors and students
demur. “The faculty are justifiably suspicious,” Katherine Stevenson, who heads
the developmental math program at Cal State Northridge, told the system’s board
of trustees the other day. The CSU Academic Senate warned of “rushed and poorly
designed implementation.”
That doesn’t faze Cal State’s bosses,
who insist everything will be OK. No one knows how it will all work out, but
answers should start coming next fall.
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Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com
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