Making transition to college smoothly is very important

Remedial education, developmental. College prep. Pre-college.

All these names refer to the same thing: the work that colleges and universities do with students to bring them to the point where they can succeed in regular college-level studies.

Pierce College, and almost every other college in the state, has a number of students who need help in all three areas of “reading, writing and ’rithmetic.” Math, in particular, is a major area where many students don’t have the necessary skills to succeed in college.

Pre-college courses have come under intense scrutiny as the Legislature prepares to cut the state budget further, based on sour revenue forecasts. Some legislators have questioned whether state colleges should even offer this level of education.

I’ve heard some of them talk about the responsibility that students themselves have to take to be adequately prepared. I’ve heard others talk about issues in the K-12 system that lead to the need for this kind of remedial education, and how those issues should be addressed at the K-12 level, rather than in state colleges and universities. 

As I’ve listened to this discussion, I’ve both agreed and disagreed with what I’ve heard. There’s no question in my mind, for example, that students must be responsible for their education. Teachers can’t pry open the heads of their students and pour knowledge into them (as much as we sometimes wish we could).

Education is a transaction, not a delivery.

One of the things we know, not just from our experience but also from scientific study of the learning process, is that students must be actively engaged in order to learn.

At Pierce College, from the beginning of a student’s work, at every level, we stress the fundamental need to take responsibility for their own education. The vast majority of students I’ve talked to understand that.

Still, many of them just don’t have the skills to succeed in college-level work when they come to us. That isn’t because they’re lazy or because K-12 didn’t do its job. Often, it’s because our students don’t come to us directly out of high school.

The average age of community-college students is the late 20s. Many of our students are what we call “returning adults” — they haven’t been in school for years, and they haven’t done the kind of work we require of them in years. They’re like many of us — they haven’t written a scholarly essay or solved a quadratic equation in some time.

Without pre-college work, we’re asking these students to run a race when they’re out of shape. They need some conditioning before they can run and cross that finish line.

That’s the conditioning pre-college courses gives them.

Pierce College and other community and technical colleges are actively pursuing ways to help these students to cut down the amount of time they need before they can do college-level work.

We and other schools are looking at “modularizing” pre-college work, to better diagnose what students know and what they don’t know and to target those areas where they need help. We’re adding an “I-TRANS” program to accompany our “I-BEST” program.

I-BEST — Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training — is a highly successful program that has gained national attention for the way it integrates adult basic education and English as a second language with job training. I-TRANS is built off that model and integrates pre-college work with college-level transfer courses.

When students see how their studies connect, and how pre-college work pays off in better achievement in their college courses, they become more engaged and successful with their own education.

There’s more we’re working on. In particular, we’re strengthening our ties to K-12 in order to make the transition for students from high school to college work more smoothly. We’re looking at refining our own diagnostic entrance testing so students get placed into pre-college work more precisely.

And we’re emphasizing the need for deep student engagement in their studies and the sheer amount of hard work that’s necessary in order to get a degree and be successful.

Pre-college work is often misunderstood. But it’s a vital part of what Washington community and technical colleges do, which is to provide a path to success, personal growth and prosperity for our students and our communities.

Many of the technicians, nurses, engineers, and all the other professionals that community and technical colleges help to educate, are people who started their work with pre-college courses.

If our colleges don’t provide that kind of work, then we’ll see a loss of human talent that we can ill afford.

Patrick Schmitt is the president of Pierce College Puyallup.