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Writing is a recursive skill.

It involves reading and analysis as much as it does writing and editing. After twelve years of writing instruction in school, students should have mastered the art of writing before coming to college. University-level scholarship should be where they refine their rhetorical skills while exploring courses of study.

Instead, college students are graduating with gaps in their instruction, a lack of writing experience, and desultory writing skills. In fact, most college graduates seem unable to write a decent essay.

Gaps in instruction

College students do not master the art of writing, in part, because they have not been held accountable for quality writing in middle and high school.  The instructional focus has instead been on reader-writer workshops that cheat students out of understanding the basic building blocks of language. A focus on whole language has destroyed student writing.

Attention to syntax and spelling has waned over the last decade, but that’s not the only challenge. Students are mostly incapable of mounting a coherent and logical argument. Their rhetorical skills are deficient and their grammar appalling.

Who is taking responsibility for the deficit in writing skill? No one, it turns out.

Lack of writing experience

College students have limited essay writing experience. Teachers do not require their students to write essays, largely because the teachers themselves have difficulty grading them.

Evaluating writing is labor-intensive, and teachers often skip giving an in-depth analysis and feedback of writing in favor of holistic scoring.

Mediocre writing is commonplace

Students are ill-prepared to write, and the result is mediocrity.

Excellent writing skills are rarely taught anymore. High school teachers do not teach rhetoric because they haven’t learned it. College professors do not have time to instruct students in logic and rhetoric because they have a course of study to present. It’s assumed that college students will already have the skills needed for writing, and it goes without saying that students should be able to write a grammatically correct sentence.

Instead, most college students can’t put their thoughts together on paper. They are unable to express themselves clearly and coherently in writing, they lack vocabulary skills, and the businesses who are hiring college grads have noticed the deficiency.

Writing is thinking. Until we teach writing in a systematic way that includes not only grammar, usage, and mechanics, but also logic and rhetoric, we’ll continue to award degrees to college graduates who can’t write a decent essay.

If you feel unprepared for the rigors of college, you’re not the only one. The chances are good that your instructor is equally unready to teach you.

Universities assign remedial classes to teaching assistants, adjunct instructors and sometimes the newest faculty members. Those with the lowest standing – and often the least amount of teaching experience — teach remedial classes. Elite professors of distinction teach only upper-level classes; you won’t have access to the best in higher ed.

Unprepared students get unprepared instructors.

How the system works

Remedial classes are most often assigned to part-time instructors. These teachers often have only a bachelor’s degree. Many work for several colleges, and in doing so, keep minimal office hours. Colleges do not require that the instructors have a background in teaching.

Assigning full-fledged university professors to remedial classes offers little hope for ameliorating the situation. Universities do not mandate that their fully-tenured faculty have backgrounds in education. These professors have been hired because of their prominence in their fields of study, not for their ability to close learning gaps.

Thought-leadership and remedial instruction are worlds apart.

Who gets left behind

As a result, remedial classes are failing students.

According to the Community College Research Center, three out of every five students enrolled in remedial college English classes don’t acquire the skills needed for college coursework. The prospects are worse for remedial math classes, where 80% of students never make it to college-level math.

Good grades are no indication of success

You may have earned As and Bs in high school, but even a 4.0 GPA is no guarantee that you’ll be able to skip developmental classes in college.

Prepare now

Having to take remedial college classes adds to the cost of a college education, requiring both money and time.

Enrollees will not see a tuition break for remedial classes. All tuition hours are billed the same, but the hours spent in remedial courses will not count toward a degree plan. Instead, these courses hold students in limbo until they are ready for the rigors of authentic college work.

To prepare for your college education and skip remedial classes altogether, do these things:

1. Take your high school classes seriously by studying the material and mastering it.
2. Get a feel for a college class by taking a dual-enrollment course Close gaps early. Hire a tutor and sign up for study sessions to get the help you need.
3. Close learning gaps early. Hire a tutor and sign up for study sessions to get the help you need.
4. Do well on standardized assessments and placement tests by reviewing what will be testing and practicing for the exam.

Hopefully, you’ll be prepared enough to skip remedial classes.

Higher education has reached a point where tenure is no longer an aspiration but a lofty goal and reward given after decades of dedication (and plenty of research success).

But what does tenure mean in today’s world, and more importantly does tenure matter?

The answer is usually yes, but the reason depends on who you ask.

Tenure Protects Academic Freedom

Too often, the benefits of tenure for both universities and staff are considered only in terms of the budget. But the benefits of tenure – and why it matters – lies in academic freedom.

If the bulk of college and university staff in the classroom are ineligible for tenure, then it defeats the purpose of taking risks and teaching. Staff who aren’t protected aren’t free to teach in the most meaningful and beneficial way possible.

There’s no room for error or change or challenge for teaching staff who don’t have the security of tenure or even the security of a multi-year contract.

Instead, staff must balance keeping students happy – whatever that means – with being on the job market and with participating in the research and publication duties expected of them even without hopes of a tenure track.

There’s also the issue of the rise in volatile politics. As local, state, and national policies veer in drastically different directions every election cycle, tenure protects those doing good work from becoming victims of politics.

Few have figured out how to preserve academic freedom when the outlook for tenure is bleak.

Tenure Hurts New Research

Tenure helps young teacher and researchers work hard and stay the course, but the current tenure system also hurts them.

The old guard holding onto positions until death or retirement, whichever comes first, prevent the opening of space for new research.

Additionally, tenure forces faculty to split their time, taking good researchers out of the lab and putting them in the classroom and forcing good teachers out of the classroom and into the lab because of a system focused on research income rather than merit.

Can We Balance Tenure?

Tenure matters in positive and negative ways. But is there a way to balance tenure to protect academic staff without sheltering them?

Potentially.

Some say that finding parity in a world without tenure means ensuring the non-tenure track staff are protected. The use of multi-year contracts could be replaced by fair salaries, particularly because those salaries aren’t promised until retirement.

Additionally, as Bernstein and Kezar point out over at The Conversation, there is the option of re-thinking the tenure system to be based on incentives that focus on more than research revenue includes a teaching tenure track for those who dedicate their time to the classroom.

What is your experience with tenure? Does it matter anymore, or does it matter more than ever?

Hospitality and travel aren’t the only sectors seeing disruption from new trends and emerging technologies.

Higher education has seen its fair share of disruption. In some cases, innovation is threatening the very model higher education is based on.

Here are five trends set to disrupt higher education:

Virtual Reality

A few years ago, MOOCs were a primary concern of administrators across the country because the promise they held threatened to replace campuses. That concern has waned because students prefer a more formal classroom setting to achieve.

However, the advancements in virtual reality threaten to pick up where MOOCs left off. Investment in virtual reality technologies in the classroom will allow VR to bridge the gap that separated MOOCs from traditional classrooms by providing the human connection students seek.

Skills Crisis

For years, millennials were pushed into higher education classrooms by their parents. The result has been a generation who is better educated than ever before, but who lack the skills to fill trade roles, creating a skills crisis.

As we acknowledge the need to learn trades and skills, more and more students who weren’t a good fit for the traditional four-year degree in the first place will see it as a viable option for a comfortable career.

Failing University Finances

Universities facing budget crises pass their rising costs on to students. Both public and private institutions have raised their fees by 28% and 27% respectively.

However, as students begin to see a smaller tradeoff between growing fees and well-paying jobs, more students will likely change their minds about the true value of a four-year education.

Better Options for Learning

At this point, it is well recognized that a strict classroom education doesn’t work for everyone. More importantly, many fail to emphasize learning outside the classroom.

Technological disruption has plagued higher education since the invention of the internet, but it’s not a trend that is going away anytime soon. While one swift technological swoop, like MOOCs, won’t kill higher education, little advancements and new products will take more and more students out of classrooms and give them a total education experience.

A Change in Funding

Rising costs aren’t the only thing affecting universities: the federal government has started to take a more hands-off role to funding universities, too.

Even Democratic administrations, which historically favor more public spending on education, have said universities need to sort out their finances if they want to stay afloat. These aren’t just words; many American universities generate more money from tuition fees than they do from public funds.

Whether you look at funding, teaching, or attendance, new trends are disrupting higher education as we’ve come to know it. How have you seen your universities change?