From https://www.yahoo.com/news/remedial-college-classes-costing-students-billions-151713187.html?nhp=1:

TakePart.com

April 9, 2016

Add another log to the raging fire that is the student debt crisis: One in four incoming college freshmen is required to take remedial classes at full expense and without credit toward graduation, a requirement that tacks on roughly $1.5 billion to tuition costs nationwide, according to a new report.

Unlike other issues in higher education, however, the problem has swept into the middle class along with poor and minority college students, according to the report Out of Pocket: The High Cost of Inadequate High Schools and High School Student Achievement on College Affordability.

Forty-five percent of students who were required to take remedial classwork came from well-off families, the report’s authors found, and those students entered college with a less-than-rigorous high-school education.

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Eduhonesty: The outrageous expenses associated with remedial classes have been attacked before in my blog. If the problem is spreading into the middle class, though, we need to realize that something has been going badly wrong in the recent past. It’s easy to explain away those remedial classes for poor students from families without college backgrounds. But as more middle class students require college remediation, questions arise with frightening implications. Has American education as practiced under No Child Left Behind and current educational theory declined so drastically? Will the repeal of No Child Left Behind ameliorate the damage? How far down the river have we drifted without our paddles? Can we find our way back to shore?

The very best interpretation of this information that I can conjure up involves middle-class students who previously would never have been pushed into college because counselors and families knew those students lacked the necessary background knowledge for success. Perhaps those students are now being FAFSA’d and matriculated in our univisionary college-for-all world, despite their lack of readiness. I would like to put this spin on the article referenced above. I do know one or two of these kids, kids with helicopter parents who intend for their child to pursue engineering or medicine despite the fact that those kids cannot pass regular math classes without extra tutoring.

But I also suspect the Testing Monster combined with current inclusion and group work policies may be creating remediation requirements where none would exist if we simply stopped making learning so tough for many kids in public schools. That 20% of my school year that I spent in last year’s math classes testing or reviewing for tomorrow’s test? My students would have learned a great deal more math if that 20% had been 10% or 5% instead. They would also have learned a great deal more math if I had not been forced to give every one of them required, identical work written by outsiders — work that they sometimes could not even read — according to a time table set by outsiders that ignored what those students knew and what they had learned.