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2010. “Currently, only a third of students graduate on-time with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed beyond high school.”
—Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
1968. “The college or university must function in a real rather than an imaginary society…and in the real world human capabilities range from idiocy to genius.…To prepare individuals for useful roles, institutions of higher education, it seems to me, cannot abandon their responsibilities as testing agencies.”
—Logan Wilson, President, American Council on Education
1952. “The primary purpose of higher education is to advance the intellectual resources of our society and to stimulate the development of the student of intellectual promise and interest. This raises the question of which young people are to be defined as ‘college material.’.…We believe higher education should accept as its first concern the education of those young people who fall approximately within the top 25 percent in intellectual capacity.”
—Commission on Financing Higher Education
1903. “[S]till without doubt many are asking, Are there a sufficient number of Negroes ready for college training to warrant the undertaking? Are not too many students prematurely forced into this work? Does it not have the effect of dissatisfying the young Negro with his environment? And do these graduates succeed in real life?”
—W.E.B. Du Bois
1890s. “[I]n the 1890s Harvard used its medical school as a safe place to admit those sons of wealthy alumni who could not pass the undergraduate college admissions examination.”
—John R. Thelin, historian
1828. “Numerous and formidable difficulties are to be perpetually encountered. One of the principal of these, is the call which is so frequently made upon us, to admit students into the college with defective preparation. Parents are little aware to what embarrassments and injury they are subjecting their sons, by urging them forward to a situation for which they are not properly qualified.”
—The Yale Report of 1828
1643. “And by the side of the Colledge a faire Grammar Schoole, for the training up of young Schollars, and fitting them for Academicall Learning, that still as they are judged ripe, they may be received into the Colledge of this Schoole.”
—New England's First Fruits, a pamphlet describing Harvard College
(For sources, go to this feature at changemag.org)
Resources
1. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation “College-Ready Education.”, Retrieved from http://www.gatesfoundation.org/college-ready-education/Pages/default.aspx
2. Commission on Financing Higher Education (1952) Nature and needs of higher education, pp. 46-48. Published for the Commission on Financing Higher Education by Columbia University Press., New York, NY.
3. Committee of the Corporation, and the Academical Faculty (1828) Reports on the course of instruction in Yale College, Hezekiah Howe., New Haven, CT. (Yale Report of 1828)
4. Bois, Du W.E.B. (1989) The souls of black folk, Bantam Books., New York, NY.
5. Hofstadter, R. and Smith, W. (eds) (1961) New England's first fruits, 1643.. American higher education: A documentary history, 1, University of Chicago Press., Chicago, IL. (Italics in original.)
6. Thelin, J. R. (2004) A history of American higher education, Johns Hopkins University Press., Baltimore, MD.
7. Wilson, L. (1968) Carrots and sticks in the higher learning, University of North Dakota Honors Day Address, February 27, 1968, in Selected Speeches and Commentaries, 1968–1969, (p. 8). American Council on Education records, ACE Archives, 1918–1977, Office of President Wilson, Addresses Articles and Speeches, Entry 19, Box 2, Folder 1, Hoover Institution Archives
Lara K. Couturier is a PhD candidate in history at Brown University and a consultant specializing in higher education policy. She previously served as the interim principal investigator and director of research for the Futures Project: Policy for Higher Education in a Changing World.
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