My students were mostly social science or liberal arts majors as undergrads. They did not learn to write yet were granted bachelor’s degrees in majors that I presume involved a lot of writing. If they don’t take my class with the writing component, they also graduate with master’s degrees without having learned how to write.

So I don’t at all deny that this material is hard. And of course you’re right that first-year math and English classes are currently cheap to teach. But I draw a different conclusion from yours: they’re cheap to teach because lecturing at 400 students from the front of a classroom is a terrible way to teach hard material, and lots of students flunk out in their first year because they fail basic courses like calculus and Econ 101. Click through my links and you’ll see some of the remedies: carefully selected streamed lectures and other ways of presenting the main ideas; lots of interactive computer modules; and plenty of assistants at all hours to answer questions and constantly tutor. Could this work for introductory English classes, as well as math? Sure, more than we realize. For instance, it might be an excellent way to teach basic grammar, which California schools no longer cover. The assistants could work on writing. In both math and liberal arts, we would still need real professors to teach material beyond the basics; that’s what I meant by material that will have to be taught much as it is now. My comparative advantage is, not surprisingly, teaching political theory–not basic English composition.

I was making two separate points that cut in different directions. First, we teach students badly, and the remedy for that is force a shift of resources into unglamorous and labor-intensive instruction. Second, doing this will, at least at first, cost money rather than saving it. And for that reason a lot of that instruction may, alas, have to be outsourced—in the interests of students, not instructors.

You’re exactly right, teaching basic writing is considered boring, unrewarding and low-prestige, and it is resource-intensive. The lower you go in student preparation, the more resource-intensive it is. It is in administration’s interest pretend there isn’t a problem. In fact the standard response to instructor concerns is to claim there would be no problem if those who teach content were to do more “writing across the curriculum” (and of course, to be “more engaging” while we’re at it).

Wonder who’s graduating those individuals who can’t fill out a job application or calculate the interest rate of a payday loan? My open-admissions four-year institution, for one. Yes, someone please audit us!

First, you have a english major’s view of math – it’s not becoming a human adding machine. The concepts are difficult.

Second, read the blog ‘Confessions of a Community College Dean’ (name from memory). When discussing budget issues, he points out that math and english (and history, poli sci, etc.) are the cheap courses. A liberal arts MS or Ph.D. standing in front of a class is cheap. The expensive courses are those with major lab/facilities requirements, and people who come at higher rates.

Nothing I have seen in the last twenty years since graduating from college would lead me to believe that journalists know the first damn thing about writing.

1) We were expected to take the test at 8:30. This is normal hours for me now, but in college, I never took a class that started before 10:00. By senior year, I had upped that requirement to 11:00 as I found the 10:00 am classes were giving me too hard of a time.

2) There were no reference materials. It was just one simple question that we were to answer as well as we could. So, what if the question happens to be in an area that some students are extremely familiar with relative to other students? Wouldn’t that bias the results? Well, they had a way to get around this problem.

3) The question was designed to be as completely pointless, simple, and uninteresting as possible. I could answer the question in one sentence. In other words, they were testing our ability to bull****. Of course freshmen are going to be better at that. Exceedingly few high school English teachers count off for it, and many reward it. A good college teaches you not to bull****.

4) I took the test my senior year, but core classes are normally taken during the first two years of college. Since my field of study did not require a lot of writing, I was two years removed from serious training in this area. A better comparison would come from testing students at the end of their sophomore year with students who just graduated high school.

There are many things I like and don’t like about my college, but that essay revealed nothing about the school’s quality.

Of course, the same academic attitude (not universal) that views good teaching as a sign of research incompetence would utterly scorn the idea of professorships aimed at teaching clear communication. So yes, you would need either some outside force insisting on the change or else adoption byone or more universities whose prestige is beyond reproach.

Beyond that though, one of the arguments I heard quite often from college English profs was that students were coming into college writing ill prepared from high school. I think you’d have a hard time convincing many of those departments that it was their responsibility to fix the problem. There’s a strong feeling that its not a problem to be fixed at their level.