Illiteracy on the rise at CSULB

What's wrong with this picture?

James Neal, directo r of testing and evaluation services, said that 80 percent of the freshman class coming to Cal State Long Beach are ineligible for English 100 (Composition).

To put it bluntly, 80 percent of freshman students are not qualified to take freshman English in their freshman year. What? Shouldn't all things that begin with the word "freshman" go together?

Exactly. But that isn't what's happening. Instead, freshmen get stuck in the two or three remedial classes that they need to get through in order to finally achieve the glorious status of being enrolled in English 100.

The English 001 (Writing Skills), according to the 1994-1995 CSULB Bulletin, "reviews organization, paragraph and sentence development, appropriate word choices, and co nventional mechanics, including spelling." The even more remedial Intensive Learning Experience 010 is, as its name connotes, an intensive course in learning how to write.

Whatever happened to all those years of taking English classes? Let's see - one year of learning the ABC's in kindergarten, eight years of elementary and four years of high school. That's a grand total of 13, count them, 13 years of learning how to read, write and understand English.

The thing is, it's not that these s tudents are stupid. It's that the education system is stupid because it lets students go through the system without preparing them adequately for a college education.

Yet, despite the fact that these students are unprepared, CSULB still accepts t hem. Nothing against them, but their very presence adversely affects the entire CSULB system.

It's a vicious cycle. Eileen Klink, director of the intensive learning program, said that this fall, there are 500 more freshmen and a great majority ar e only eligible for the remedial courses that can only take a maximum enrollment of 12 to 15 students.

So how does this affect everyone else? The English department recently received $120,000. All this money went into the addition of remedial c ourses. Meanwhile, some students are languishing in their upper division coursework because money isn't finding its way to their departments. Go figure.

And what about those freshmen? The more remedial classes they need, the more time it will tak e them to graduate. Then factor that in with CSULB's current average graduation rate, as stated in the May 1994 Commission Report, of 5.6 years and students get a pretty discouraging picture of their chances for graduating. This would definitely les sen CSULB's chances of attracting students of good academic standing who want to graduate early.

The moral of it all is that students who are not qualified to do college-level coursework should not be admitted into CSULB. After all, our mission is to provide post-secondary education, not re- training.