‘Free College for All’ Is an Experiment That Has Already Failed

In 1970 New York’s City College had the best of intentions. It tried ‘open admissions.’ It was a bust.

By Jackson Toby. He is a professor of sociology emeritus at Rutgers. His latest book is “The Lowering of Higher Education in America: Why Student Loans Should Be Based on Credit Worthiness.” Excerpt:

"When students realize that they will get into college no matter what they learn in grade school or high school, they will have no incentive to forgo activities that are more fun than attending school, listening to teachers, and doing homework.

As Albert Shanker, the late president of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote in 1993, “Kids are just like adults: they will work to get what they want. If they know they have to work hard, listen in class, and come to school every day with their homework done to get into college, they’ll do that. If they know they can get by with less and still get into college, that is what they’ll do.”

New York’s City College was once known as “the Harvard of the proletariat.” As the flagship college of the City University of New York, it charged no tuition but admitted only applicants who scored well on an academically difficult test. After African-American and Puerto Rican protesters chained shut the gates of the college in 1969 to call attention to the relatively low numbers of minority students, in 1970 City College adopted a policy of “open admissions” and began accepting underprepared students.

Remedial education was to be the solution. By 1978 the New York Times reported that “two out of three students entering City College now require remedial work in writing, mathematics or reading, and one in five needs it in all three.”

Twenty-two years after open-admissions experiment started, liberal journalist James Traub spent 18 months observing how it worked. He interviewed hundreds of City College students and attended classes. On the first day of a remedial course in basic skills, Mr. Traub saw Prof. Rudi Gedamke show students a headline from the student newspaper: “Student Turnout Nil at Games.”

Mr. Gedamke asked the students what the headline meant. One student wrote: “He/she is not good for nothing.” Other tries, all quoted verbatim, included: “Students spend most of their studies time as their leisure times” and “Students are getting addicted toward it.” “Students act uncivilized at games” or “Students turnout facinate at games.” There was only one answer Mr. Gedamke deemed correct: “No one didn’t go.”

Mr. Traub’s 1994 book, “City on a Hill,” revealed students with academic handicaps too severe to be repaired by their efforts or the efforts of their teachers. His anecdotal accounts were confirmed by statistics. A City College study of 155 students placed in its remedial English program found, Mr. Traub reported, that only seven had graduated after six years, and another half-dozen or so after seven years. Only 15% were projected to complete college after a decade. They weren’t flunked out; they gave up and dropped out.

In 1998 the City University’s board of trustees voted to end the open-admissions policy at four-year colleges, requiring applicants to pass proficiency tests in reading, writing and mathematics to gain entry. The experiment had revealed the limits of good intentions and remedial education alike.

National studies show that the worse the academic preparation of admitted students, the lower the college graduation rate. Syracuse University’s Vincent Tinto, an expert on student attrition, reported in 1993 that colleges with an average SAT score of 1100 or higher have a first-year attrition rate of 8%. For colleges with an average SAT score of 700 or below, the first-year attrition rate is 45.5%.

For a student to understand what college teachers are teaching, he needs to have developed, grade by grade, a working vocabulary of several thousand words. Mr. Gedamke’s students couldn’t keep up."