Letter: Colleges fail because students aren’t ready

Sunday, Aug. 27, 2006 | 7:28 a.m.

I strongly disagree with the Sun's Aug. 22 editorial headlined "How to make the grade." Your solution (and apparently the Board of Regents' solution) to the extremely low rankings of UNR and UNLV in the latest U.S. News & World Report is to throw more money at the Nevada university and college system. In fact, that always seems to be the solution proposed for anything regarding education in this state.

The students being admitted to the system are simply not ready for college-level work. How does anyone expect that throwing more money at the colleges will change that? The problem that needs to be fixed occurs before the student is admitted. Nevada's Millennium Scholarship program allows virtually any Nevada high school graduate who can breathe to be admitted to the university system.

At least the Legislature finally managed to pass some sensible legislation and will no longer pay for remedial classes for students on the Millennium Scholarship program. About time. Now it's time to look at why those students lack proficiency in math and English when they graduate from our high schools. That's where the focus should be.

Ultimately, the choice to be made is between relatively lax admission standards so that most Nevada high school graduates can expect to be admitted to a Nevada college or relatively tight admission standards in order to raise the national rankings of our institutions of higher learning. You simply can't have both. Princeton, Harvard, Stanford and Cal Tech simply don't admit students with 2.75 GPAs. That's why they get the high rankings.

Personally, I'm in favor of the loose admission standards to give our own citizens a good start in life. And I'm willing to live with the low national rankings for our colleges because we're catering to our own citizens.

David Adams, Las Vegas