A generation ago, a college education wasn't a necessity. Someone with only a high school diploma could get a decent job. These days it's almost impossible to find a stable, well-paying job without going to college.
Perhaps one reason is today's jobs are more technical than in the past. Another reason is that students have to go to college to gain the same amount of knowledge once provided with just a high school education.
Consider this: A generation ago, people routinely graduated high school with a solid knowledge of math, science and English as well as often having studied areas such as classic literature and Latin.
It seems the average high school student these days is lucky if he or she can simply master basic reading and writing. Sure gifted high school students may have some exposure to the classics, but not those in the middle or back of the pack. They may never read Shakespeare, learn how to conjugate verbs or study Galileo's discoveries.
Every year Georgia high schools graduate thousands of students who lack sufficient math and language skills. Which means, before moving on to the state's two- and four-year colleges, they have to take remedial classes that cover material which should have been learned in high school and earlier.
Of the approximately 167,000 students attending Georgia's public universities this year, 16,084 were in remedial classes during fall semester. Two-year schools had 10,269 of those students, while the remaining 5,815 attended one of the four-year research, regional and state universities.
The University of Georgia has 22 remedial students, many of whom are scholarship athletes, according to university spokesman Tom Jackson. The university also has more than 400 students enrolled in academic assistance courses intended to help them compete at UGA. The academic assistance courses are required for those students who score in the bottom 10 percent on tests UGA gives to every freshman to measure their knowledge in math, language and social science.
Jackson emphasized that these courses aren't for remedial education.
''It's us helping them. It's us tutoring them. It's us saying you're in the bottom strata of UGA's students in this subject matter, and you need some help to be competitive here,'' Jackson said.
The number of remedial students at UGA has been declining over the years. The most likely cause of this decline, Jackson said, is the university's rising admissions standards. As the standardized test scores and grade point averages needed to get into the university climbs higher, the number of students who need remedial classes declines.
While it is a good sign that the number of remedial students is dropping at the University of Georgia, there are still a disturbingly high number of students at the state's other colleges and universities who haven't been prepared for higher education. They receive college-prep diplomas from high school, but they haven't been given the skills to pass freshman classes. If students bound for college haven't been prepared, just imagine what the other students are missing.
This is just one more sign that our public schools aren't meeting the fundamental needs of their students. Somewhere between kindergarten and the twelfth grade, there are students who either haven't been taught the necessary information or they haven't learned it. Yet, despite their deficiencies, they are promoted to the next grade. Unfortunately, without a solid foundation, these students can't properly build on their education in subsequent grades. Many will become frustrated and drop out of high school. Others will manage to graduate, and some may even get into college, where, hopefully, the gaps in their education can be filled.
No matter what the outcome, it's clear that there are still too many students who pass their classes, but get failed by their schools.
Published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Sunday, December 16, 2001.