By PHK
It’s rare when I agree with the contents of an editorial in the Albuquerque Journal, but the criticisms of the sorry state of academic standards at the University of New Mexico in the Journal's lead editorial November 30 “New Regent for UNM is a Pivotal Decision” ring all too true. According to the editorial, UNM President Louis Caldera was “rebuked” by the Board of Regents last summer “for the modest suggestion that admission for incoming freshmen be deferred if they need remedial work in at least one of three courses – the work of a summer school session.”
The Journal argues that “coddling students who are on the road to failure doesn’t do them – or the institution – any kindness. Fewer than one in five of freshmen who need three remedial courses manage to earn a college degree. That contributes to a dropout rate that holds UNM’s academic standing low, which scares off many students with the discipline and ambition to take an educational opportunity in both hands . . .” It’s also terribly unfair to all students - qualified and not - as well as faculty asked to fill the basic skills gap.
Declining Standards. . . mushrooming enrollment
Does the Journal have it right. Just in the past few years, UNM student standards have declined and enrollment has mushroomed. Worse, full time and part time faculty positions have not increased to meet the demand, each department is supposed to turn a profit so classes are too large, grad students teach too many courses, adjuncts are poorly paid, decent classrooms with appropriate equipment are scarce, and the local community (at least in the foreign affairs field and I suspect others) could be far better used.
Who gets short-changed? The students and the state itself. Somewhere along the line the importance of training “human capital” is ignored. What is wrong with requiring pre-entry remedial courses for students who either through their own folly or the failures of the American K-12 educational system do not belong in a university?
"Whole Word" reading one part of the problem
Here’s one part of the problem: American universities, I’m told, now face a bumper crop of young Americans who learned to read via the “whole word” method. What this means is that too many can’t spell well, can’t write well, and can’t read well. Spell check can only help so much.
This failure also negatively impacts on foreign language learning because part of that little secret requires one to learn a word’s meaning by sounding it out and breaking it down into parts. Kind of like taking a machine apart to understand each part’s role before putting it back together again to see if it runs.
So how are these young Americans going to be able to compete in the today’s world? Aren’t we doing our society and its youth a disservice by “promoting” for promotion’s sake?
I don’t think the students are stupid – they aren’t. They desperately need help in filling fundamental educational gaps so they don’t fail in today’s competitive job market and end up on society’s margins in dead-end MacDonalds’ type jobs.
Meanwhile more and more foreigners – particularly highly trained Asian engineers and scientists – are taking their places because these students learned the basics, how to study, to analyze, to work hard and can and do compete.
Shades of "the New Math Fiasco"
This reminds me of an earlier generation of American students who were taught to compute via “new math.” This generation had to overcome the results of this fly-by-night idea that spread like wildfire through American colleges of education in the 1970s. As boring as it may seem, a little memorization of the multiplication tables can go a long way – long before one needs to grasp the complex idea of set theory.
It’s no wonder that the latest National Science Foundation statistics indicate that over 29 percent of the 42,155 Ph.Ds awarded by American universities in 2004 went to foreigners on temporary visas, a rise of 18 percent since 1974.
Most plan to stay. But how many of them should stay? Aren’t many of these newly minted scientists and engineers needed at home to help raise the standard of living in their own countries? How reliant should American corporations in the knowledge industry and otherwise become on foreign talent and expertise – or will these corporations ultimately move off-shore taking their highly skilled jobs and employees with them?
Why should university faculty fill the remedial gap?
Yet if the K-12 education system can’t prepare American students adequately to meet the minimum requirements for higher education, why should it be up to university faculty to fill that gap when it can be done at far less expense and with less agony in smaller classes in community colleges closer to home? Should a Ph.D. need to teach basic writing skills? Isn’t this a waste of resources - of that precious commodity called “human capital?”
Perhaps New Mexico should also implement a “frontesteria” system of licensed private, after-school institutes to fill students' basic knowledge gaps. Whatever the solution – and there are a number of possibilities that haven’t been tried and suggestions are welcome – the students in this state are being short-changed.
In my view, however, it should not be left to the universities to insert finger in crumbling educational deficit dyke.
For the record: I have been teaching a class as an Adjunct in UNM's political science department since 1999.