UV Law prof James Ryan raised a damned good question on the back-page commentary in the latest Education Week: Where in God’s name are the nation’s university presidents when it comes time to talk about the nation’s K-12 education disaster?
His entry point is the recent news that Harvard, Princeton, and UVA are in the process of trying to actively recruit more low-income students to their incoming freshman classes. Writes Ryan:
The effort by these three institutions to recruit more poor students is laudable, but it’s also like treating the symptom rather than the disease. The real problem is not that there are bus loads of qualified poor students every year who just decide to give Harvard a pass. It’s that there are far too few poor students who are even remotely prepared to attend Harvard. Stepping up the recruitment of poor students might create a more diverse campus and therefore benefit colleges and universities, as well as the lucky few poor students who attend them. But why don’t college presidents also talk publicly about the fact that so few poor students seem prepared to attend college, let alone an elite university? Better still, why not talk about what to do about that fact?
Can you imagine what would happen if the pipes and collars in university administration buildings all across the country started talking about how much time (and resources) are devoted to teaching even our best and brightest students remedial skills like how to write a term paper? If they came out and said, gee we’d love to admit more low-income minority students but by the time we get them from out K-12 system, they are utterly unprepared for anything resembling academic rigor?