College professors have often expressed alarm about the number of entering freshmen who need remedial courses, and now administrators are joining in. The most recent figure, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education (February 24, 1993), was 30 percent--or about one college freshman in three. Some of these kids can't read; others don't know how to study. Whatever their problem, they're sitting in "college" classes learning material they should have mastered in high school, or earlier.
Professors are worried about the effect of large numbers of marginal students on college standards; administrators about the costs of remediation. Both are right to worry. But while there is a lot of concern about students who are at the bottom, there is little said about some equally disturbing figures relating to students at the top. I'm talking about the decline over the past 20 years in the proportion of students who get top scores on the verbal section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).
Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education (January 13, 1993 ), Christopher Shea says that fewer students scored 600 or above on the verbal SAT in 1992 than in 1972, even though more students took the exam. In absolute numbers, 116,630 scored above 600 in 1972 and only 75,243 in 1992--an enormous drop. Of course, with more students taking the SAT, you would expect to see a decline in the average score, but what could possibly explain the drop in the number of top scorers?
In "The Other Crisis in Education," Daniel Singal of Hobart and William Smith Colleges also describes this decline in top performance though he calculates it in slightly different terms--Singal says that youngsters going to selective colleges have lost an average of 50 to 60 points on the verbal SAT (Atlantic Monthly, November 1991). As a result, he says, these kids are less able to understand what they read than students a generation ago, so they need shorter and easier assignments. They are less able to write or think or carry on a coherent argument. And, because they have read less and understood less, they also know less.
What's the reason for this decline, and what can we do about it?
Shea offers some familiar analyses:
-- Kids are not reading much, and the stuff they read does not offer them the challenge they need to become better readers.
--They are watching too much television.
-- Educators are "uncomfortable with the idea of an academic elite." As a result, they spend comparatively little time and effort on high achieving students.
-- The effort educators have made to improve the achievement of average students has brought down the level of top students at the same time as it has raised the level of students at the bottom.
-- Standards in secondary schools are low, and they are getting worse.
This last item is a typical view of who's to blame: Elementary school teachers blame parents for the problems youngsters bring to school; high school teachers blame elementary school teachers for what kids don't know; and colleges blame high school teachers. But what about the responsibility of the colleges? Don't their admissions policies have anything to do with declining standards?
The college officials Shea interviewed seem to view the problem as inevitable--something over which they have little control. For example, although average verbal SAT scores at Rice University fell from 664 to 633 over a period of 20 years, the dean of admissions explains the change by saying that the 1960s "were the days of higher test scores." At Hamilton College, where average scores fell 77 points, from 639 to 562, the dean talks about the school's more diverse freshman class. And at the University of Chicago, where average scores fell 40 points, the dean's explanation is that scores are falling everywhere.
Whatever colleges pretend, their influence over high school standards and student achievement is decisive. Kids are just like adults: They will work to get what they want. If they know they have to work hard, listen in class and come to school every day with their homework done in order to get into college, they'll do that. If they know they can get by with less and still get into college, that's what they'll do. Shouldn't schools and parents be doing more? Shouldn't they be putting pressure on youngsters--holding kids to higher standards and forcing them to work harder? They can try, but unless they can say, "You won't get into college unless you work harder and meet standards," the pressure is not going to work. In lowering their standards, colleges have undermined the authority of public schools and parents to demand more of students.