60 percent of new freshmen in the United States are assessed as unprepared for college-level work, most commonly in math

Inside Higher Ed reports:

There is a crisis in our traditional remedial mathematics education. Many, likely most, math faculty members have already heard much about this crisis. But many faculty members outside math departments are unaware of it and how it negatively affects them, which it probably does. Once you are aware of it, you may want to contribute to solving it, which you possibly can.

The basis of the crisis is that 60 percent of new freshmen in the United States are assessed as unprepared for college-level work, most commonly in math, as Mari Watanabe-Rose, Daniel Douglas and I summarize in a recent paper on the topic (a paper that provides citations for much of the research reported in this article). Only about half of students who start taking remedial math ever complete it, and many students, though they are required to do so, never take remedial math at all. Evidence even shows that students assessed as needing lengthy remedial math courses, while accepted to college, are less likely to actually begin it, contributing to what is known as “summer melt.”

The end result is that students assessed as needing remedial math are far less likely to graduate than students who have been assessed as being college ready. For example, at the City University of New York, only 7 percent of the new freshmen assessed as needing remedial math graduate from a community college in three years vs. 28 percent of other students. Being assessed as needing remedial math (which most commonly consists of elementary and/or intermediate, as opposed to college, algebra), may be the single largest academic block to students graduating in our country.

Just another reminder too many people are going to college.