James Traub uses the City College of New York as a metaphor to describe changes in American education. City College was founded in 1847 as America's first urban college. It charged no tuition, but was definitely not second-rate. Between 1920 and 1970 it produced more graduates who went on to get Ph.D's than any other college in the country except Berkeley, even though during that period it had no graduate program of its own. It assigned itself a transformative mission, not to "reproduce privileges, as the Ivy League schools did. It gave poor, talented [students:] the opportunity to make it into the middle class."

During the sixties City College became the focal point for the demands of black and Puerto Rican students, who now constituted a majority of the population surrounding the college, to increase their enrollment. The college was viewed as elitist and white; it was not serving all the city's population. The college (and society at large) was torn between a desire to increase the proportion of minorities in participation in the American Dream (which college represented) and the meritocratic ideal that one succeeded by being the best and working the hardest, not by virtue of privilege or class. Some argued that college was too late to try to rectify' inequities and flaws in an educational system that had, after all, the charge of those students for 12 years before college even became an option. Relying on the recommendations of high school officials, the college developed several remedial programs aimed at identifying potential college students and bringing them up to par with other incoming students. Nothing worked or satisfied the opposition, and in 1970 the college surrendered to the confluence of several powerful trends taking place in American education: "the century-long movement toward mass higher education, the changing demographics in the American city, the critique of meritocratic distinctions, a growing sense of obligation toward the black poor, and CUNY's own expansionism."

Ironically, despite the lip service paid to meritocracy, the American educational system has fostered an entirely different set of values that James Fallows argued against in an Atlantic article several years ago. He suggested that in a true meritocracy one is judged by ability to perform the task, not by the possession of a certificate or some other piece of paper, a situation he refers to as "credentialism" - the need for credentials to prove one has participated in a set of courses that may or may not provide the skills to perform a task.
City College found itself overwhelmed with students. Their enrollment doubled. But they also discovered that most of these students were unprepared for college. Remedial courses were established to bring students up to college entry level standards. The problem was it didn't work. Students moving from remedial math to non-remedial math were flunking Out at a rate of 75%. Basic writing did not improve at all. Theodore Gross, Dean of Humanities, a proponent of open admissions, reported sadly: "When we failed to bring students to the accepted level of literacy, we blamed ourselves - we hadn't been adequately trained or we lacked patience or our standards were set too high or too quickly. But in fact we had false expectations....

[The students':] entire miseducation and bookless past rose up to haunt them, and all the audio-visual aids and writing laboratories and simplified curriculum materials we tried could not work the miracle. The mistake was to think that this language training would be preparation for college education when what we were really instilling was a fundamental literacy that would allow social acculturation to occur. We were preparing our students to be the parents of college students, not the students themselves." He was fired for his lack of team spirit.

There were exceptions. A pilot program of talented, exceptionally dedicated teachers were able to produce students from remedial classes who exceeded the performance of better-prepared, non-remedial students.

Traub immersed himself in City College, going to classes, talking with students. It soon became clear that the students with the best chance of success were those who had immigrated, who had had some schooling outside the United States. Students who had gone to high school in this country had adopted the attitude that education was something that happened to you "rather than something in which you were an active participant... schoolwork was something you did only in school itself." A truth had become apparent to all, "a truth that virtually everyone at City College recognized, although scarcely anyone spoke of it directly: the very students whom open admissions was designed to help were arriving at college so deeply disadvantaged, psychologically, as well as academically, that City was virtually unable to help them."

The problem is we all want to believe in the mission, i.e., that "all one's hopes for a fully democratic society were bound up with the idea of imparting the power of literateness to impoverished inner-city youth...."

CUNY does have a bright spot, a department that has world respect and an extraordinary reputation: the engineering school. The standards there are actually higher than they used to be. There is still open admissions, but everyone who declares an engineering major must take only introductory courses until they have satisfied a myriad of requirements including innumerable trigonometry and calculus courses, modern and quantum physics. Traub speculates that society can't afford to tinker with the requirements for engineering. It's not life-threatening if a social science major can't quite read, or a psychologist can't quite think; it's a vastly different set of circumstances if the engineer designing the bridge can't do the math. "And so standards, in engineering, were not seen as the stalking horse for some elitist social agenda."

The engineering school didn't get the rich, advantaged kids, either. It specialized in study groups, tutoring, and a special retention program that focused on analytical and test-taking skills. ft was astonishingly successful. It was also extremely well funded due to the country's recognition that engineering skills are crucial to the success of the economy. But they are also selective. They demand highly motivated students who have the potential to succeed. ( )