Students: why bother studying?

• Author: Mulcahy, Fred
• Position: Need for higher standards for financial aid to college students

CAN'T AFFORD to send your kid to college? Want to get a college loan or outright tuition grant? Your offspring has no high school diploma or equivalency degree? No problem. See the U.S. Department of Education. They give lots of loans and grants to people like this.

Until recently, I was a Federal grant coordinator and instructor in state community colleges in the East, Midwest, and Southwest. Over a period of 20 years, I saw many students--their tuition paid by Federal grants or loans--who were academically unprepared and couldn't handle college studies, as well as a few who were unwilling even to try. (The Department of Education does not require a high school diploma or equivalency degree for college tuition grants or loans, only a financial need.) I remember some of these students attending classes in Business Management who couldn't spell either word correctly.

Let me cite two specific cases. I was the advisor to an unprepared student attending a state community college with an enrollment of several thousand. He had been on a Federal tuition grant for four or five years in this upscale, rural school with dormitories, dining hall, and Olympic-sized swimming pool. He told me that, despite his efforts, he never had been able to get his grade-point average up high enough to graduate. As a high school dropout, he simply hadn't had the prerequisite studies necessary to take college credit courses. Nevertheless, as he said, going to this school was "a pretty good life."

The second is a less common, but nonetheless real, case of a student who was both unprepared and unwilling to try. As an instructor in an inner-city state community college--with an enrollment of nearly 10,000--I was advising someone receiving a Federal tuition grant plus a state subsidy grant. She had registered for Finance and two or three other relatively difficult college credit courses. Her transcript showed that she had a very low grade-point average, no high school diploma or equivalency degree, and had failed four assessment tests. (At this college, such exams were given as a regular part of the registration procedure, but were not mandatory; failing them did not affect a studnet's eligibility to enroll in credit courses.)

When I counseled her on the difficulty of the courses that she had registered for the probability of her failing them, she agreed, but indicated that she had no intention of graduating and getting a job anyway. She explained that, if she took a job...