College beat: Broken Promises on Remediation

At Manhattan Community College, the largest of CUNY’s seven such institutions, “80 percent of the school’s incoming students each year are assigned to remedial classes,” notes David Cantor at The 74. And “from that moment, if averages hold, their chances of earning a degree — or even passing a college course — sink.” Indeed, “the more remedial classes they need, the dimmer their academic future.” Nationally, he reports, only about 40 percent of those “who started community college in 2010” earned a degree “in six years” and enrollees in remedial programs skew “poor and minority.” Plain and simple, “remediation doesn’t work, or not very well, except with the most unprepared students who complete their entire sequence of remedial courses.” After all, “if students are already behind in early elementary grades, how can a college be expected to elevate them over a year or two in their late teens?”