So argues Cal State Fresno professor Bruce Thornton in an excellent City Journal article.
Among other dismal revelations, we learn that more than half of the students who enroll in the CSU system need to take remedial coursework. The original idea was that CSU schools were for good high-school grads who weren’t quite up to the elite University of California institutions. That they now accept large numbers of students who essentially need to go back to high school (or earlier) tells us a lot about the degradation of California’s K–12 system.
They could always change the tests... There is some light profanity in the video below, so if you care about that sort of thing, don't click on the link. You'll be missing out on something great though.
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Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAlas, I fear that the situation is worse than that, not just at CSU.
Many students who could succeed at UC, or even more elite places, do not get in for a variety of reasons. Remember, elitist schools want to know much more than one's intellectual accomplishments (or performance, in performance disciplines). Or, one could be admitted, but not be able to go.
Now imagine how it feels for such a student to go to a lesser place, where many of the students are remedial and have conduct to match it. For this, the good student studied hard? And, in this grade-inflated college culture, excellence is lost, perhaps even degraded if the instructors have their own agendas that reward conforming mediocrity. The difference in experience is a lifetime penalty.
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