The desire to “help” students from low-income backgrounds and substandard K-12 environments by steering them toward college, no matter how unprepared those students may be, has created a number of harmful consequences. One of those consequences, highlighted by this Wall Street Journal piece, is that unqualified college applicants with weak English and math skills and low standardized test scores are receiving billions in federal grant dollars each year to take remedial courses.

Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank, was interviewed by the WSJ: “If somebody is reading and doing math at a middle-school level, they are not going to succeed at college, and we should stop pretending otherwise.” Right. And if those students are succeeding in college, we should be deeply concerned about diminishing academic rigor. While much remediation tends to take place at the community college level, it steadily has begun to creep in at four-year institutions.

The signal that a college diploma used to send has been compromised; it’s become more and more difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff because of “anyone’s acceptable” higher education policies. And the “progressive” push to expand college access has only hurt the people such access was intended to benefit. Real progress would entail a massive overhaul of shoddy K-12 schools that are in reality glorified day care centers. The fact that so many college students, even students exempted from taking remedial courses, exhibit such inferior writing and math skills is just one more indictment of America’s elementary and secondary education systems. It shouldn’t be higher education’s mission to fix that train wreck.