City HS grads pay to catch up in college

Thousands of city publicschool graduates falter as college freshmen and have to empty their pockets because of it, according to a new report.

Ill-prepared for collegiate course work, more than 21,000 city graduates end up shelling out an average of $3,000 annually for remedial classes, according to a study by pro-charter advocacy group StudentsFirstNY.

Dubbing these costs a hidden “remediation tax,” the report estimated that they pay roughly $63 million a year to absorb basic knowledge they should have learned in high school.

“Students are forced to pick up the slack for a K-12 system that failed them — depleting whatever grants, scholarships, loans or personal resources they had planned to use to pay for college,” the report said.

Mayor de Blasio has cited the city’s 72 percent graduation rate as tangible evidence of improvement, but the city’s overall collegereadiness rate languished at 37 percent last year.

The college-readiness threshold is met when students get minimum scores on standardized tests or pass certain courses before graduating. According to CUNY standards, students who meet these requirements won’t need remedial classes.

Several CUNY students who were forced to take and pay for remedial classes gathered at City Hall Thursday to call attention to the matter.

“It’s just really disappointing to learn that the highschool diploma I just received does me no good in college,” said Bronx International HS grad Cristian Cruz. The Department of Education said the report inflated the number of kids needing remedial classes and argued that college-readiness rates have been improving.

“Every single city collegereadiness measure is at a record high and increasing,” said DOE spokesman Will Mantell, adding that the city has initiatives in place to address the issue.

City high-school grads pay at least $63 million a year for remedial classes, thanks to a school system that hands them worthless diplomas. That’s the bottom line of a new StudentsFirstNY report on the “remediation tax” paid by young men and women who move from city schools to CUNY, only to find they’re not ready to do college-level work.

They have to waste their first semester, or even their first full year or longer, learning the skills and knowledge they didn’t get from the city Department of Education, even though it graduated them.

Time spent on remediation also eats up students’ limited resources — the grants, scholarships, loans or personal savings they’d counted on for higher education.

Too many quit before they’re caught up — and others never finish college after starting so far behind.

CUNY Chancellor James Milliken calls the lack of college readiness — defined as meeting CUNY’s standards for avoiding remedial classes — his system’s No. 1 issue, even though it’s not CUNY’s fault.

Last year, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz said the city Department of Education should absorb the costs of these kids’ remediation: Why let it get away with sticking the students with the cost of its failures?

And the full “remediation tax” is higher still: This report doesn’t count the cost to kids who try to make it in the workplace without basic skills.

By the city’s own reckoning, only 35 percent of its high-school graduates last year were college- and career-ready.

Meanwhile, Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carmen Fariña cheer their minor gains in handing out diplomas. Hmm: StudentsFirstNY last year flagged 65 city high schools with above-average graduation rates — but college-career readiness rates 50 points lower.

The problem long predates de Blasio, it’s true. But he keeps insisting city schools will be fine with just a bit more fiddling at the margins. In fact, he’s doing nothing to make a city diploma worth the paper it’s printed on.