To Help Students, Colleges Are Dropping Remedial Courses. Will That Backfire?

Article note: I increasingly view leading on people who aren't ready as _cruel_ and bordering on theft. The absurd cost of college makes dithering in college a life-fucking proposition for many, and having students who (for example I have to deal with) don't understand _variables_ in sophomore-level math based courses is a demoralizing waste of time for all involved. I sometimes get unpublished numbers through the grapevine, the 5-year success rates for students admitted to UK's college of engineering who aren't calculus-ready is so low as to be essentially inevitable failure. Empirically, many of our most successful students are the ones who had the wherewithal to pre-position themselves at a community college at a tiny fraction of the cost. We want more of the latter and fewer of the former. Build a robust system to get them into programs that position them to succeed. Find ways to make those programs cheaper, more accessible, and more cleanly connected to college paths. I'm not sure that one of my colleague's "Offer deficient students admittance contingent on attending and successfully completing a remedial summer program" could be made to work here in reality, but it's still more promising than leading them on for a very expensive year then torturing them until they drop out. Universities are disincentivized to do the right thing here because then they don't get to cash in on the crash-and-burn process of hopeless cases filling seats in their giant service courses.