What Does it Mean to be College Ready?

The college and career ready movement has crashed and burned. What can we find in the ashes?

I think we have enough evidence to call it: the explicit orientation around the purpose of school being to make students “college and career ready” has failed.

Writing at Forbes,

Peter Greene

sifts through the ashes of the movement pursued through the various stages of contemporary education reform, NCLB, Common Core, Race to the Top, and so on and so on. The chief disconnect between what allows someone to thrive in post-graduate employment and what students experience in school is a lack of preparation for “less structured” “autonomous” work.

As Greene notes this is not surprising in a world where in the service of making students college and career ready, the curriculum was steadily narrowed to what could fit into what Greene calls the Big Standardized Test (B.S.T).

This is the problem of Campbell’s Law, where doing well on the measurement (the B.S.T.) came to dominate the activities students were asked to do. Training students to answer multiple choice questions after reading 150-word extracts from longer texts is not a route to the kinds of rich reading, literacy, and critical thinking we wish for them. The game of doing well in school became the equivalent of being college and career ready, but that game had nothing to do with what people actually have to do in college or their careers.

This was all foreseeable. How do I know? I am among the many who foresaw it, as I publicly documented in a 2014 post at Inside Higher Ed in which I pleaded with education officials pushing the CCSS and college and career ready framework to “stop destroying students.”

I was writing in immediate response to the news that a suburban New York City school had cancelled their kindergarten pageant because they needed the extra time practicing testing to make sure those 5 and 6 year olds were “college and career ready.”

Kindergarten! It’s madness. Kindergarten is where you learn to tie your shoes, to stop eating paste, and generally how to become a semi-autonomous little person.

As I said in that post, I knew we’d been on the wrong track for quite sometimes because when I asked my first-year college students what high school had been like for them, they answered: a combination of boring and stressful.

I can’t imagine a worse thing when it comes to an enterprise that’s supposed to be oriented around learning.

This got me thinking about what actual things we should be concerned about when it comes to making sure students are college and career ready. What we’ve been doing hasn’t worked, so let’s make a better target.

Here’s my list of what makes someone college and career ready.

Curiosity: If there’s any one thing I think serves students well, it’s curiosity. A curious student wants to learn because they are hungry to know more about the world. A really curious student can figure out how to make the most of a subject they might not be initially interested in.

Self-regulation: The relative freedom of college after the more structured experience of high school throws many students for a loop. I have seen many academically well-prepared students fall into spirals of procrastination or challenges of social life/work life/school life balance. We shouldn’t expect students to be a finished product on this front - Because honestly, who is? - but those who have practice managing their own schedules tend to do better once they hit college.

Passion: It is actually very rare that I encountered a student who wasn’t passionate for something, but I did see lots of students who saw little connection between what they were passionate about and what school had to offer. One of the reasons I tried to design as many of The Writer’s Practice experiences as possible to invite students to write about things they were interested in was to tap into those passions.

Empathy: Maybe this is particular to a first-year writing course, but because I required students to write inside an authentic rhetorical situation with an audience that has specific needs, attitudes, and knowledge, their work was significantly enhanced by being able to inhabit the experiences of others. I also think it’s a useful skill in terms of making friends, being part of a community, and maybe even being kind to ourselves when it comes to our inevitable flaws and foibles.

A healthy skepticism of authority: This may seem strange, but as long as we emphasize the “healthy” part of this trait, I think it’s a very important aspect of a successful student. In my courses, I tell students that they’re joining an ongoing academic conversation. Students understandably wonder if they have the knowledge or standing to join that conversation, given that the will be interacting with texts and materials generated by people with more experience or credentials that convey cultural authority.

Rather than training them to adopt the positions of their elders, I want students always thinking critically so they engage in the process of creating their own minds.

Lots of students entered my first-year college writing course skeptical of school as a place for learning. As quickly as possible, I want students to embrace the mindset that their education belongs to them, and that making of it what they will is their responsibility, not mine.

I realize my list is entirely oriented around the attitudes and orientation I want students to bring into college. Obviously, there’s other stuff that matters. What do you think makes a student “college ready?”

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