Cal State Cracks Down on Remedial Students

In its first crackdown on unprepared students, California State University announced Wednesday that it has booted about 5% of last year’s freshman class, informing 1,440 students not to come back until they have mastered the required English and math skills.

An additional 1,259 freshmen needing remedial work left on their own, and about 1,300 were given one final chance this fall to pass remedial courses and thus prove that they have the basic skills to handle university-level work.

“We are trying to be firm and fair,” said Chancellor Charles B. Reed, who has championed the get-tough approach throughout the 22-campus system. “The message is that we mean business.”

The message seems to be getting through. Although 68% of last year’s freshmen arrived in need of at least one remedial class, only 6% of that class, now enrolled as sophomores, still needs remedial help.

That’s an encouraging drop, given that as many as 48% of last year’s sophomores at Cal State campuses had not finished their remedial work.

The difference was the chancellor’s new policy: Freshmen have one year to complete all remedial work, or they’re out.

All this pressure is aimed at persuading students to learn these skills earlier in their scholastic careers, preferably in high school.

It’s part of a multi-pronged effort by Cal State officials to ease out of the remedial-education business, which ties up professors’ time, stalls students’ progress and costs the CSU system about $10 million a year.

Cal State isn’t the only public university wrestling with remedial education, which critics say is tantamount to double billing taxpayers for failures of the public high schools to properly prepare students.

Nationwide, 29% of all college freshmen have to enroll in at least one remedial class in reading, writing or mathematics.

Yet unlike the recent decision of City University of New York to bar remedial students until they are ready, Cal State officials plan to work with the public schools to gradually reduce remedial education to no more than 10% of freshmen by 2007.

Thousands of Cal State students now venture into elementary, middle and high schools as tutors. Cal State faculty are helping teachers set up testing programs to determine if high school juniors and seniors are prepared for college.

The idea is simple. If high school students pass Cal State’s placement test, they will be deemed prepared for college math and English. If they fail, they can brush up on the skills they need while still in high school.

As part of this effort, university officials have printed 75,000 posters--and 25,000 more in Spanish--that they plan to distribute to the schools to give students a step-by-step guide on how to meet all Cal State requirements.

Presenting sample posters to Cal State’s Board of Trustees on Wednesday, Executive Vice Chancellor Dave Spence said the high percentage of freshmen who completed all remedial courses shows what can happen if the university outlines clear expectations and imposes limits.

Yet enforcement of those limits--getting expelled--varied widely among Cal State campuses. Cal State Northridge drew a sharp line, sending letters to 120 freshmen telling them they must complete remedial courses at a community college before returning to the university.

Other campuses sent far fewer such notices, although the university’s systemwide office has yet to sort out campus-by-campus figures.

Furthermore, some campuses exempted more students from the deadline than others. Exceptions were granted for students who needed only one remedial class and got snagged by scheduling snafus, or had learning disabilities, medical emergencies or other special circumstances.

Although the campuses booted out only a tiny fraction of last year’s 28,327 freshmen, the university’s first systemwide “disenrollment” policy sat uneasily with some campus leaders.

“The term ‘disenrollment’ is so draconian,” said Harold Goldwhite, the faculty representative on the Board of Trustees. He urged campus presidents to explore “creative arrangements” with community colleges to teach remedial courses on Cal State campuses.

“There are very large bureaucratic hurdles that students have to cross to get back to Cal State campuses,” he said. “I’m not saying ease off, I’m saying don’t cut them off.”

University officials have no ethnic or racial breakdown of those 1,440 students asked to leave. But San Jose State President Robert Caret said that many students struggling with English composition come from non-English-speaking homes.

“It’s a developmental problem, not a remedial one,” Caret told the trustees. “A huge percentage of our students speak English only in the classroom,” he said. They speak another language outside class.

Although Cal State officials said they have not received a single formal complaint by an ousted student, the policy raised hackles of Latino students at a recent statewide conference of Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, said Candy Angel, head of MEChA’s Northridge chapter.

“It’s not so much a race issue, as a class issue,” Angel said. “I know some of the students who were asked to leave. These students have completed the requirements to be accepted by the university and yet we are asking them to leave.”

The university, she said, seems to send contradictory messages: At the same time it encourages more minority students to enroll, it kicks some out. “This is a public university, and everybody deserves the right to stay in school,” she said.

Civil rights lawyers, meanwhile, are closely monitoring how Cal State handles its new remedial policy, said Thomas A. Saenz, regional counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

“Cal State,” Saenz said, “is a prime avenue for Latinos to get a bachelor’s degree.”