College for all means failure for many.  Only 36 percent of two-year College students graduate within three years, and less than 60 percent of four-year college students within six years.

High school transition programs show mixed success in improving college readiness, write  researchers Zeyu Xu, Ben Backes and Dan Goldhaber. By “mixed,” they mean “little.”

While the racial gap in high school graduation has narrowed, racial inequalities in college completion rates “have been rising or stagnant,” they write.

. . . 60 percent of high school graduates are not fully prepared to take college-level coursework, and racial gaps in college readiness measures have changed little during the past decade.

Worse, most students who are deemed not college-ready have skill levels far below the established benchmarks: 88% are far below in math; 76% are far below in English.

Seventeen states have launched programs to prepare 12th graders for first-year college classes, but few have reduced the need for remediation, research shows.

Transition interventions in West Virginia and Florida didn’t appreciably reduce students’ need for remediation upon college entry. And although Tennessee’s transition intervention program reduced Remedial Math Enrollment rates in college by 30 percentage points, these outcomes were driven by a policy that automatically exempted high school students who successfully completed the transition curriculum from college remediation. A post-intervention assessment conducted by researchers found no improvement in student math skills.

In each of these states, students were no more likely to pass introductory math and English courses required for a degree.

“The latest evidence from Kentucky is slightly more promising,” the researchers write. Targeted Interventions (TI) reduced remedial math enrollment by 8-10 percentage points. and increased the number of four-year students who passed gatekeeper math courses within the first year of college. “However, TI does not appear to have translated into detectible increases in credit accumulation after the first few years of college, or the rate at which two-year college students successfully transfer to four-year colleges.”

Students who are “far below” the math and reading level needed for entry-level college courses need to start learning those skills before they reach 12th grade. Or they need to find another path to the future, understand what skills will be required and focus on learning what they’ll need to know.