CUNY’s Remediation Needs Remediation
By John Garvey
On March 4th, The New York Times published an article about remediation at CUNY that highlighted the large number of students who need remediation and the frustrations of CUNY faculty. The article’s major focus was on the financial and intellectual burdens that students needing remediation, especially those needing a great deal of remediation, placed on the University. A senior University official was quoted as suggesting that CUNY was not able to fulfill its obligations to better prepared students because of the drain of resources to remediation.
According to the Times, about three-quarters (just over 13,000) of the 17,500 freshmen at CUNY community colleges needed remedial instruction in at least one of three areas (reading, writing, math) and one-quarter (about 4400) needed help in all three. Not surprisingly, many readers who commented to the Times web page focused on the number of students needing remediation and the failure of the city’s public schools to graduate students
