What Does It Really Mean to Be College and Work Ready?

The nation is, at long last, engaged in a serious discussion of what it might take to make sure that our students leave high school college and career ready. But what exactly, does that mean?

Almost three years ago, we decided to find out, by looking at the levels of mathematics and English language literacy high school graduates need to succeed in their first year in our community colleges.

Why focus on community colleges? About 45 percent of US college students are in these institutions. They provide most of the vocational education done in this country, and are therefore the main gateway to work requiring solid training, but not a four-year degree.

Half of the students in these institutions are in programs designed to enable them to transfer to four-year colleges. So community colleges are also a main pathway to four-year colleges.

Since a large fraction of community college students enrolled in the general studies track go on to four-year colleges, it is clear that for a substantial majority of high school graduates, being ready to be successful in the first year of a typical community college program is tantamount to being ready for both college and work.

There was, of course, no shortage of opinions about what it might take to succeed in the first year of community college, but much of it was based on asking panels of college faculty for the answer.

This method of determining education standards, however, is notoriously faulty, because educators, job foremen and others presumably in a position to know typically answer based on what they would like students and workers to know and be able to do, not what the program of study or the work actually requires.

We quickly discovered that no one had done in-depth research on what was needed to be successful in our community colleges.

So we set in motion two empirical studies, one focused on English and the other on mathematics requirements. The results run counter to some widely held opinions that turn out to be just plain wrong in the light of our findings.