Bruce Maiman
Once again, college students from all over the state flocked to Sacramento on Monday to protest education cuts and tuition hikes.
The system suffered a 20 percent spending cut last year. In response, the colleges raised fees for students, eliminated courses and furloughed workers.
It may surprise you to know that these students, telling taxpayers to spend more money as they struggle to pay their way, are leaving up to $500 million in Pell Grants untouched. They don’t apply for them.
About half a million of California’s 2.9 million community college students could receive a federal Pell Grant, according to Debbie Cochrane of the nonprofit Institute for College Access and Success in Berkeley.
Why does the money sit there? Because the application process is complicated. “A lot of students do give up,” Cochrane says.
One student told the San Francisco Chronicle she thought about applying for financial assistance but when she showed up at the financial aid office, she walked out.
“Every time I’ve gone to the financial aid office, the lines are ridiculously long.”
I wonder how many students complaining about long lines for Pell Grants spent Monday traveling to and milling around Sacramento. Better than standing in line or filling out a form online to apply for a grant of up to $5,350, I suppose.
So not only are taxpayers not spending enough money; they won’t do anything about those long lines and complicated forms. After all, students can’t be expected to endure such hardship for an opportunity to apply for free money (free, at least, to the student).
And then there’s the Department of Redundancy Department, where 60 percent of CSU freshmen are remediated in high school math or English, or both.
These are students who graduated from high school with a B average or better (because you can’t get into CSU without a B average) and they’re not proficient in high school math or English. How did they get the B average? How did they graduate? Why are colleges teaching high school courses? It does work. Claudia Keith at CSU’s Public Affairs office says 90 percent of CSU freshmen are fully proficient after that first year of remediation.
But isn’t that the high school’s job? And what’s it costing taxpayers for colleges to “graduate” high school students in high school subjects that students apparently failed to learn in high school? No one I spoke to at CSU knew, but a study two years ago by the Pacific Research Institute, a conservative think tank, put the cost at $247 million annually.
It gets better. In 2012, CSU launches a new program called Early Start to identify deficient students while they’re high school juniors and require them to take remediation courses as seniors or in the summer prior to college (right now, aptitude testing and extracurricular prep courses are all voluntary). Keith explains that Early Start gets students hitting the books again because they tend to coast in senior year.
But if students don’t hit the books and fail to pass or complete the courses, they’re still admitted to CSU because these are students who maintained a B average or better.
Ponder that for just a minute. We’re spending money to educate high school kids in high school courses and college kids in high school courses. Now we’re going to spend money on a program to require high school kids to take extra-curricular high school courses because they can’t seem to learn it in regular high school courses because they coast in their senior year. But if they don’t pass those courses, they can still go to college.
Yet, some college educators say Early Start isn’t fair because it might force students to give up their part-time or summer job. How will they find the money to go to college? Well maybe they can apply for a Pell Grant – if the lines aren’t too long. Or maybe they can learn the subject in the original classes designed to teach them.
How about we graduate these students with a B average only after they’ve proved proficient enough in English and math so they don’t have to be remediated in college at all?
How about we don’t give them a high school diploma until they’re proficient in English and math at the high school level?
How about we make the high school graduation requirement the same as the entrance requirement for CSU? Is that too revolutionary an idea for our public education system?
So, after spending taxpayer dollars to prepare high school students to go to college, we spend an additional $247 million on remediation because high school standards aren’t up to the CSU entrance requirements. Meanwhile, students protesting education cuts and rising tuition rates are costing us $247 million because they weren’t proficient in core subjects, yet $500 million in Pell Grants goes wanting because the burden of applying is too overwhelming.
I wonder if that’s worth protesting.