Underprepared College Students

* Re “A Course of Action to Help Students Succeed in College,” by Warren Furutani and Jack Fujimoto, Commentary, Nov. 7: As a community college trustee, I am appalled that the suggestion is made by the authors that the solution to the extensive, troubling problem of academically underprepared students can be solved by community colleges. The solution to the problem is not to add a “readiness year,” but instead to focus on the K-12 educational system and why too many students continue to get through the system so woefully underprepared.

As leaders of higher education we cannot continue to promote pushing the problem upward. The mastery of the basics of education, reading, writing and math, needs to occur in the K-12 system. This is why the public has over the years allocated a great amount of fiscal resources for that purpose to that segment of education and not to the community college system.

Instead of a “readiness” year, I advocate another alternative for the problem. Using the millions of precious public dollars currently being spent yearly by community colleges in remedial education, I say that community colleges should work with high schools to identify students in their first year who require remedial education and work together to solve the problem early on and not later.

PAUL J. GOMEZ

Rancho Cucamonga

* Furutani and Fujimoto’s commentary is nothing but a smoke screen. In fact, many high schools do not do their jobs when it comes to preparing their students to go to college. So Furutani and Fujimoto want community colleges to do that job for them. How much will taxpayers pay to educate students in community colleges, compared to educating high school students?

Additionally, how many more buildings must community colleges build to house high school students, and how many more instructors must they hire?

If high school administrators would get busy preparing students for college instead of turning their students’ senior year into nothing more than party time, then the students would in fact be prepared for college. Would you like to know who told me that? Seniors in high school told me that.

DON K. PIERSTORFF

Costa Mesa