"Remediation" in Colleges and Universities

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, in 1920 22% of Whites and 6% of Blacks had a high school degree; 4.5% of Whites and 1.2% of Blacks has a bachelor’s degree. It has no data for Master’s or higher degree until 1995.

In 2013, the last year for which I can find data, 94.1% of whites, 90.3% of Blacks, 75.8% of Hispanics, 95.4% of Asians, 95.5% of Pacific Islanders, and 84.7% of Native Americans had a high school degree; 40.4% of Whites, 20.5% of Blacks, 15.7% of Hispanics, 60.1 of Asians, 24.7% of Pacific Islanders, and 16.6% of Native Americans had a bachelor’s degree.

Do a great many people, of all races and ethnic backgrounds, need help with their educational aspirations? Absolutely. A parallel bit of data: PISA scores for kids who go to the highest SES schools outdo the scores for the most impressive national scores, like those of Finland or South Korea: 545 for the highest SES schools in the US and 541 for Finland. But the PISA scores for kids who go to the lowest SES schools are abysmal—in the lowest of the SES schools the scores amount to a measly 434. Those numbers are from 2009, when I did the research.

To be sure, in the US SES is so closely associated with race/ethnicity that it’s not surprising that only Asians and Whites have PISA score in the range of Finland. You can of course attribute the difference to race. I attribute the difference to SES.

By the time my kid had graduated from college, he had been to innumerable museums, had seen innumerable plays, had travelled overseas, and as a little kid had had book after book read to him until he picked up the reading habit for himself. He graduated from a very low SES school in PA. But his family, my wife and I, had the wherewithal to make up for what the school may have lacked—and I emphasize the MAY because in fact, with a couple of exceptions, the school district did pretty well by him and his cohort in the highest “track.”

It's always a matter of SES.

Given all that, I think maybe instead of bitching about the support that some of our students need, we should be celebrating the fact that, overall, 89.9% of American kids have a high school degree and 33.6% have a bachelor’s degree. That doesn’t mean that the education they’ve achieved is stellar. That will come when the SES evens out.