The NYT reports:
Only about half of this year's high school graduates have the reading skills they need to succeed in college, and even fewer are prepared for college-level science and math courses, according to a yearly report from ACT, which produces one of the nation's leading college admissions tests.
The report, based on scores of the 2005 high school graduates who took the exam, some 1.2 million students in all, also found that fewer than one in four met the college-readiness benchmarks in all four subjects tested: reading comprehension, English, math and science.
Read the whole thing here.
The situation is actually worse than the article indicates. The ACT bases its judgment on a correlation between scores on the test and success in college classes, but at many schools grade inflation has dramatically lowered the standard for success in those classes.
There is a simple solution to this, but one that unfortunately is impossible to implement in today's political climate. If colleges refused admission to students who lacked essential skills the public schools would be forced to start teaching those skills. Of course such actions would be branded "elitist", "racist", "exclusionary" and what-not, and colleges would lose all those funds they get to support remedial education programs and the number of FTEs would drop precipitously. So, it's not gonna happen.
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