"In 11th grade, the most relevant grade relating to college readiness, 30.5% of students met or exceeded math learning standards. Of these, nearly half exceeded the learning standard — marking them as likely to be the best prepared for a college STEM major."
Politicians in California want the ethnic mix of students at public universities to reflect the ethnic mix of the state population. They cannot achieve this goal if colleges use academic preparedness as the main factor in admissions:
> Politicians in California want the ethnic mix of students at public universities to reflect the ethnic mix of the state population. They cannot achieve this goal if colleges use academic preparedness as the main factor in admissions
That's a satisfiable goal, but it means they have to accept that they need extremely broad and deep remedial courses, and they need to treat admissions more or less like a community college does. Is that what they're looking to do? What are their goals regarding the existing community college system?
The politicians don't accept that students need remedial courses.
They passed AB705 and AB1705 to prevent a community college from putting someone in a remedial classes unless it had very strong evidence they wouldn't be able to pass a regular (transfer-level) class.
So if you go to a community college and intend to study for a STEM degree, you'll be placed in a calculus class.
> They passed AB705 and AB1705 to prevent a community college from putting someone in a remedial classes unless it had very strong evidence they wouldn't be able to pass a regular (transfer-level) class.
Why? Did someone make students graduating from high schools who go on to need remedial courses into some kind of metric for the high schools, and the politicians are trying to "solve" the schools' low scores on this metric by cheating?
I'm sorry, I was not prepared for how insane this is. It's super late, so I'm going to need to do it later, but I guess I should go look up those bills.
While it seems obvious that some students should be redirected to remedial classes, the evidence is that very few students made it past those courses. IOW, the obvious solution wasn't working.
Being an engineer, my instinct would be to fix those classes so that they did work. However, legislators think at a different level and reasoned that the remedial classes constituted a false promise that costs students dearly (time, money, hopes, and dreams).
I have been really puzzled by this situation and haven't been able to stop thinking about it since last night. I spent a long time chatting with an LLM and reading articles published by community college instructors and university faculty in California, and looking for examples in other states, the research (in California and other contexts) that examine the related problems with remedial courses.
I've learned a lot, but the one example I want to raise is one I learned about how some other community colleges have addressed the same problem. In some states that where the solution wasn't mandated or constrained by legislation, schools replaced their conventional placement test and remedial courses track with repeatable, low-stakes testing. When you fail the test, it points out where you were weak and directs you to study material, and then you can study only the parts you struggled with and retake it as soon as you want, as many times as you want, for free. If you fail repeatedly you're offered a kind of integrated online course that is self-paced rather than a fixed semester length and has a really favorable class size (15 students, 2 instructors). It's sold as a service community colleges can buy into, and I really know nothing about it, so I don't want to name the vendor. I don't know if their particular tests are actually good, of if their streamlined course recapitulate any of the failings of conventional remedial courses.
But the general outline seems... pretty good, right? It isn't expensive for the students, it isn't a lengthy detour, and it doesn't work by lowering standards or potentially fraudulently promoting unprepared students (which I imagine adjunct professors at community colleges are systemically pressured to do at institutions where administrators care about their pass rates).
I'm not sure if "Come back as soon as you're ready, here's where you struggled, here's where to get extra support if you need it, all of this is free" should be considered fixing the remedial courses or bypassing them, but it seems doable and like it addresses the time, money, and stigmatization/discouragement problems with old-school remedial tracks.
Anyway I hope California can get more creative here and try to get serious about measuring success (i.e., actually do more testing of learning outcomes when they make changes like this, instead of just looking at course completion rates). It seems like a solvable problem.
Fixing them is completely doable, and the solutions are obvious, as you point out. But the political will to accept the obvious consequences just isn't there.
Meaning, the demographic distribution of students taking (and re-taking) the entrance exam is likely to not match the distribution of the state as a whole.
Rather than seeing this as a positive because it leads to the advancement of those who would be otherwise held back from high paying jobs, it will be denounced in coded language.
Politicians in California want the ethnic mix of students at public universities to reflect the ethnic mix of the state population. They cannot achieve this goal if colleges use academic preparedness as the main factor in admissions:
https://tools.encona.com/caaspp-explorer#slots=state%7E76%2C...
Academics presumably have multiple reasons to want students showing up having mastered the prerequisites of whichever class they're taking.