Owing to the badly eroded standards that we find in many public school systems, a large percentage of the graduates who want to enroll in college are incapable of doing even the least demanding college work. Colleges that want these paying customers go to considerable lengths to improve their academic ability; quite a few of them, after one or more remedial courses, are deemed “ready.”

The trouble, as Clark Conner notes in today’s Pope Center article, is that only a small percentage of them ever earn their college degrees. That tends to suggest that remediation doesn’t accomplish very much — after all, it’s hard to make up for many years of educational neglect and malpractice — but there could also be other reasons why graduation rates are low. I’m certain that a fair number of those students realize that even with a degree, they’re apt to have trouble in the labor market and sensibly decide that it’s not worth the further expense.

But focusing on the possibility that remediation can be improved, Conner looks at a recent paper by Bridge Terry Long of Harvard’s education school. She advocates three changes: better placement of students into remedial courses, better support for those students while they’re in college, and decreasing the need for remediation by improving high school preparation.

No quick cures are at hand. If it were possible to improve high school preparation (which should actually begin in grade school), far fewer students would need remedial courses, but the grave problems in K-12 are deeply rooted and very resistant to change.

Conclusion: don’t expect very much to come from efforts at improving college remediation.