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Perhaps the US wouldn't have this issue if we had a strong vocational program culture.

Yes, I suspect that the real reason the students "don't need" remedial programs to complete their degrees is that the specific degrees are actually vocational rather than academic.

An incoming student that can't write a cogent essay or do basic math problems simply isn't ready for any traditional degree program. The best they can do, if they're not going to grind through remedial courses, is to start training for a job.

>Yes, I suspect that the real reason the students "don't need" remedial programs to complete their degrees is that the specific degrees are actually vocational rather than academic.

x2. The more academic requirements of a 4yr degree are not strict necessities of those fields. If college is going to stand in for vocational school then it's a waste of time/effort/money to make those students take what amounts to academic fluff.

The problem is that until colleges acknowledge their vocational role every department will be pushing for every other department to require students to take a few of their classes on the basis that it is a requirement of a well rounded education (which is not the kind of education students in the more vocational programs are seeking).

It's not clear that even needs to be handled at the university level in that case, though. Community colleges already offer a range of vocational programs, with faster completion and much lower costs. This seems like purely some kind of prestige treadmill, where people really want a CC degree but employers demand a 4-year university degree, so we need to start offering 4-year university degrees that are CC degrees in disguise to bridge the gap. An alternate approach might be to convince people and employeers that a vocational CC degree is perfectly valid and respectable. But that's probably harder to do, so I don't really blame people for going this route, just seems not really ideal.

> Now, it is seen as an extension of high school; the onus is on the college to mold all comers into more educated and productive citizens, even if that means re-teaching the basics.

This seems to be the case with grad programs now too: doing the teaching that undergrad should have already done. Turtles all the way down.

In which departments have you seen that? [Not denying, genuinely curious]

i've seen some pretty shitty grad students but i don't really blame the grad school. a lot of non-cs undergrads go into cs grad programs with barely any programming experience. in my experience, the grad programs don't teach them the fundamentals (assuming they know them) but instead teach very specific niche areas. They end up never learning basic programming fundamentals.

If someone is studying computability or formal languages or algorithms or ML in a CS department, they don't really need to be programmers.

My sister is a graduate student in Neuropsychology. As part of her graduate program, she was required to take a programming class; because programming is an important tool that she needs to be able to use to do her research.

Simmilarly, most research in CS will involve using programming as a tool, even if it is not the final product. The problem is that in CS, no one thinks to require the graduate students to take basic programming classes.

> As part of her graduate program, she was required to take a programming class; because programming is an important tool that she needs to be able to use to do her research.

But for students focusing in complexity, they may not need to program at all, so naturally it makes sense there would not be much emphasis on programming.

in my opinion they don't need to BE programmers but they need to be ABLE to program.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=398

relevant song by scott aaronson

Obligatory coding horror reference:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

I'm in physics/chemistry/materials fields. I've been around several 'world-class' institutions in the UK and USA, and had mixed experiences -- far more mixed than you'd think looking at simple rankings. I wouldn't like to draw any hard conclusions though, because I only have anecdotes, but perhaps others can comment.

There is strong financial incentive among power brokers to promote as much tuition cost and student debt as humanly possible, especially when the government underwrites it, making it zero-cost to both the lender and the school. The only losers are the taxpayers, who are abstract enough to be a non-entity, and the student, who is made to believe that he must obtain and service such debt to have a successful adult life.

College was not for teaching high-school level concepts, it was for teaching advanced concepts to students who had already demonstrated some bona fides ... the onus is on the college ... even if that means re-teaching the basics.

If I put on my tinfoil hat, I start to think that the UC change is intended (at least in part) to avoid exposing the failures of California's primary and secondary schools. If they stop doing these tests, it becomes more difficult to demonstrate that the education up through high school was a failure.

EDIT: formatting

I think there's always been an interplay between different roles.

If you go back enough, the historical role of college has been that of a "finishing school" for the higher/educated classes. More so, the further you go back.

In places with a more conscious class heritage (eg UK), talented students saw these colleges as a merit-based ticket into the higher classes. Over time, academic merit gained prominence.

Social class largely overlaps with academic merit, so the identities didn't clash too hard. But, you can see both heritages in modern Universities.

For example...Colleges (esp US) are very interested in college as "tranformative years of my life" experience. Generally speaking, this is a luxury only the rich could afford. For the median family, this is still a massive expense.

TLDR: roles change.

This problem is exacerbated by the suspension of the high school graduation exam. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/hs/