Higher ed's Bermuda triangle: vast numbers of students enter community college remedial classes every year. Few are ever heard from again.

• Author: Esch, Camille

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Treating children that way is like giving a lion their food without making them hunt for it.

Jacinth Thomas-Val writes the sentence on the blackboard in her classroom at Sacramento City College, then asks her students what s wrong with it. "What does 'them' refer to in this sentence?" she asks one young woman. The young woman doesn't know, shakes her head, then gets up and leaves the classroom without explanation, not returning for the rest of the period.

More times than she can remember, Thomas-Val has explained that pronouns need to match the word or phrase to which they refer. But the students in English-Writing 40, the lowest-level writing class that her community college offers, make these same basic mistakes week after week. Thomas-Val presses on, erasing "a lion" and changing it to "lions." One young woman in the front row--clearly the eager, outspoken type--starts to get it, and asks how to fix a similar sentence in the essay she's just gotten back. But as Thomas-Val tries to explain, the back of the class dissolves into hushed talking and texting. Thomas-Val gently pulls them back to attention, but by the time she does, she needs to get the students started on their next essay assignment, a task that will consume the rest of the eighty-minute class. So she moves on.

Sacramento City is a typical California community college: its students are primarily minority, low income, and go to school part-time. Eighty-five percent of them arrive needing what are called remediation classes, courses like Thomas-Val's English-Writing 40. Remediation classes are designed to bring students up to the level needed to get started on the college's actual curriculum, to close the growing gap between what students have to know at the outset of college and what they learn in California's crumbling high school system--or, for older students, basic skills they may have once had but have lost in their years out of school.

This willingness to offer opportunities and second chances to disadvantaged students, opportunities that aren't available in many other countries, is what first appealed to Thomas-Val--herself an immigrant from Antigua--about American community colleges. But in her decades of teaching, she has been shocked at just how unprepared most of her students are, how little they know--and how hard it is to help them. "It's unbelievable, just totally unbelievable," she says. Of their writing, she says, "It's filled with all kinds of sentence-level errors. Not knowing how to join sentences or where sentence boundaries are. Capitalization problems. Stuff like that that you learned in grade school, or should have." Faced with these circumstances, Thomas-Val has adjusted her own expectations. "Let's say I have fifty students this semester," she says, "and five of them do exceedingly well. I am so grateful for the five. [For] the other forty-five, yes, my heart breaks, but I think, 'Oh, I've got five['"

The odds for Thomas-Val's students are indeed formidable. Only 60 percent of the community college's 3,000 remedial students pass their classes with a C or higher. Those who go looking for help at Sacramento City will face a melange of disconnected programs and services. The college's academic counseling center is badly understaffed, and most of the tutoring available on campus is provided by other students. A recent state initiative provided some extra dollars for remediation, which the college spent adding student tutors and a few instructors here and there, in a process one administrator calls "hodge-podgey." In such an environment, there are limits to what even a well-meaning professor like Thomas-Val, or her more enterprising students, can do.

Thomas-Val is standing astride what is perhaps the leakiest juncture in the pipeline of American higher education, a pipeline that has unquestionably seen better days. America is losing its lead in higher ed: while other countries are turning out ever increasing numbers of college graduates, the U.S. has stalled. But the problem isn't just getting high school graduates into college--about 70 percent of them already enroll. It's getting them to finish it. Only about half of American enrollees leave college with a degree, putting us behind at least ten other developed nations in educational attainment, according to a recent report by the Brookings Institution.

Where exactly we're losing all of these students is unclear. But the best place to start looking is community college, and specifically those schools' remediation programs. Nearly half of all students seeking college degrees start at community colleges, and of those, a large percentage-estimates put it around 60 percent--must take remedial classes. Remedial students run a high risk of dropping out and not graduating; one robust study found that only 30 percent complete all of their remedial math coursework, and fewer than one in four remedial students makes it all the way to completing a college degree. Students who need remediation drop out at worse rates than community college students who don't, and the more remedial classes they need to take, the less likely they are to stay in school.

There's a chicken-and-the-egg element to this, of course. Getting through two years of college is extremely hard for a student with fifth-grade skills--it may be too much to expect from many of them, even with the best help. So it's difficult to tell what exactly the grim remedial statistics say: Is the gulf between the students' abilities and the most basic requirements of college simply too wide? Or are the programs failing?

We don't know, and therein lies the problem. Community college remediation is the Bermuda Triangle of the higher education system--vast numbers of students enter, and for all intents and...