In my ongoing series of posts about how we need to rethink the whole college model – including the way we get kids there and what we do to them there – here’s an article from The Atlantic Monthly by a professor who seems to agree. He teaches at two colleges “of last resort” – places where average and worse students end up, and most of them can’t do what should be required of all liberally educated graduates: they cannot write.

Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes. Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence.

So, what happens when this happens, when so many students fail and show that they are radically unprepared for college work?

What actually happens is that nothing happens. I feel no pressure from the colleges in either direction. My department chairpersons, on those rare occasions when I see them, are friendly, even warm. They don’t mention all those students who have failed my courses, and I don’t bring them up. There seems, as is often the case in colleges, to be a huge gulf between academia and reality. No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass. The colleges and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forces-social optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal right and a need, financial necessity on the part of the colleges and the students alike, the desire to maintain high academic standards while admitting marginal students-that have coalesced into a mini-tsunami of difficulty.

No one has drawn up the flowchart and seen that, although more-widespread college admission is a bonanza for the colleges and nice for the students and makes the entire United States of America feel rather pleased with itself, there is one point of irreconcilable conflict in the system, and that is the moment when the adjunct instructor, who by the nature of his job teaches the worst students, must ink the F on that first writing assignment.

Ah, so true. It is a broken system. Too many students fail, so grading gets easier. Grading gets easier, education gets worse. On and on, until China takes over.