IT MIGHT TAKE A REMEDIAL COURSE just to fathom the statistics. At The City University of New York (CUNY) in 2007, 71.4 percent of the first-time freshman class of 9,154 students coming to CUNY’s community colleges required one or more remedial courses. (Although this number is down from 83.9 percent in 2000, say CUNY officials, it still represents just a very small percentage of the students who were enrolled in the system's 23 colleges. —Ed.). In Bloomington, Minn., meanwhile, 75 percent of the incoming freshmen at Normandale Community College took remedial math, and almost 50 percent needed remedial writing.

The latter numbers prompted a recent editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune—entitled “Too Many Students Come Unprepared”—which blamed the trend for “running up higher tuition bills and state financial aid costs, and contributing to overcrowding at the state’s largest community college.”

The problem is not confined to two-year colleges, says Normandale’s president, Joseph Opatz, who points out that more than one-third of the 260,000 students in the Minnesota state college system are taking at least one remedial course. “It’s important that we provide that access to students who come to us, but it’s a problem when such a large number of students are in that situation,” he says. In increasingly tough economic times, “students are spending money on what won’t serve them as college level courses.”

Of course, Minnesota is not alone in its remedial travails. Released in September by the advocacy group Strong American Schools, the report “Diploma to Nowhere” ( www.edin08.com/diplomatonowhere.aspx) estimated “conservatively” that 43 percent of students at two-year colleges and almost 30 percent of students enrolled in four-year public institutions nationwide had taken a remedial course. The cost of that remediation? An annual $2.5 billion, the study estimated. That may sound manageable in this age of government bailouts in the hundreds of billions. But nobody is bailing out these institutions. And what may be even more frustrating to college administrators is that 80 percent of the remedial students surveyed maintained at least a 3.0 grade point average during high school.

“We looked at race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic backgrounds, and one of the things I find striking is that the problem exists across the board,” notes Rachel Bird, a senior policy analyst for Strong American Schools. “Remediation affects low-income to middle-income to high-income students. My boss [former Colorado governor Roy Romer] likes to say, ‘Americans think it happens in another part of town or another part of the country.’”

From Kentucky to Michigan, and California to New York, there is an ongoing—and sometimes intense—debate on the role of higher education in getting students ready for college-level studies and the best approaches to take. At Grand Rapids Community College (Mich.) and Eastern Kentucky University, working with such students has become so much a part of the mission that “developmental”—rather than “remedial”—has for years been the official name for the schools’ programs.

“Good education doesn’t look at these students as sick people who need to be remediated,” argues Linda Spoelman, GRCC’s coordinator of developmental education. Of about 5,000 current first-year students, 1,085 have placed into at least one of the college’s special classes, and 753 are taking two or more.

As is typical at many colleges, these noncredit classes run for a semester. Developmental math focuses on basic operations with some pre-algebra. There’s also basic composition and two levels of reading—for students at sixth- to ninth-grade and ninth- to 12th-grade levels.

Spoelman adds that since her school sits in a heartland of displaced workers, a growing number of nontraditional students are coming through her program. “Only 20 percent of jobs can be done now without a postsecondary education, and their skills have gotten rusty,” she explains. “The critical thinking that we ask our students to do is not low-grade. It’s not that they’re unintelligent. It’s that their skills haven’t been developed.”

“I try to work myself out of a job every day,” says Sue Cain, who directs the developmental education program at Eastern Kentucky, where 37 percent of this year’s incoming freshmen arrived unprepared in at least one subject. Cain should be gainfully employed for years to come, however—especially since her school is raising its minimum requirement of 18 on the ACT to 21 in reading and 19 in math next fall. Those who don’t have high enough scores