Each September, the incoming class gathers in Richardson Auditorium to be welcomed by University officials. Almost invariably, the freshmen are told what the sophomores heard the previous year, and the juniors the year before that.
A few sentences posted on Princeton's homepage after this year's initial meeting capture the essence of the message. "They were told that they are the brightest collection of young minds in the world today. They were told that they are the newest members of a strong tradition, and with tradition comes responsibility," the posting read. "They were told that they are the great Class of 2005."
This is probably not mere adulation. At the nation's most selective schools, it is believable that each class rivals its predecessors in the talent that it assembles.
Yet considering the nation's universities and colleges as a whole, this is a much more uncertain argument to make. Following a presidential campaign, in which education was a pre-eminent issue, several recent studies suggest that students are graduating from American high schools increasingly ill prepared for the demands of college.
Moreover, there is indication that more students than ever are seeking a post-secondary education despite the decreasing ability of the nation's high schools to ready them for the experience. A report from the National Commission on the High School Senior Year, one of the most prominent of such studies, leaves a decidedly grim impression of America's educational system.
America now sends approximately 70 percent of its high school graduates into higher education. However, as the report states, only about half the nation's students who matriculate at four-year colleges leave having obtained a degree. The report, entitled "Raising our Sights: No High School Senior Left Behind," attributes this alarmingly high rate of attrition to pervasive deficiencies in American secondary schools.
Ninety percent of college freshmen believe that they will graduate. The commission, however, contends that only 44 percent of first-year students have sufficient preparation to make this a realistic expectation.
The primary concern is that, "Too many students are being left behind. Too many leave high school unprepared for further study or work." said Gov. Paul E. Patton of Kentucky, the commission's chairman. The attenuated success of secondary schools to prepare students for work at the college level is believed to arise from the disparity between the curriculum and graduation requirements of high schools and colleges.
Patton and others on the commission argue that the imposition of national standards on the education system is the most effective way to raise teachers' expectations of high school students to those a professor might have of his undergraduates.
Education, Patton says, "must be a seamless, unified system stretching from preschool to post-secondary education, with smooth transitions, in which students must master at each grade what they need to succeed in the next."
For all the enthusiasm the commission has for such measures, they would neither be easy to implement nor have unambiguous benefits to high school students. Education in the United States has traditionally been a state and municipal concern, and attempts to impose standards nationally generally have not been well received.
More important, educators are often ambivalent about national standards because they sometimes have the unintended effect of demoting education from an end in itself to a means of accomplishing some other objective.
Molecular biology professor Karen Malatesta is one such educator. "What distresses me and others in education," she noted, "are courses in high school geared only to passing a standardized test."
While she concedes that students who come to Princeton from that kind of environment have an extensive base of knowledge from which to draw, she emphasizes they also tend to lack both the analysis skills that will be demanded of them in a molecular biology course at Princeton and the experience of enjoying learning for its own sake.
Stressing memorization above all else "weakens a high school course" Malatesta asserted, but it is often something that a teacher feels compelled to do. Administrators and parents take into account student performance on such tests as the SAT II and Advanced Placement examinations when appraising teachers. Colleges also — to varying degrees — are reliant upon the tests to see how strong an applicant is relative to the others.
Malatesta therefore said she believes that high school education can be improved only if colleges relax their emphasis on standardized evaluations. This, she argues, would enable teachers to devote the necessary amount of time to developing analysis skills more thoroughly and would allow students to learn for the "broadening of mind and experiences" rather than for just a competitive score.
The general sense among faculty members and administrators at Princeton is that, while the University's students are overall as strong as ever, it is not uncommon for some to arrive needing further development of their analysis and writing skills. It is agreed that, if the generally declining quality of secondary school education in America has affected Princeton at all, it has done so minimally.
Professors often mention the College Board's Advanced Placement program when explaining why this might be the case. "Public high schools, in which there are AP programs, generally prepare students very well for good schools," economics professor Elizabeth Bogan said.
Princeton students disproportionately tend to have had secondary school instruction including these courses or equivalents. The AP program appears to be helpful because the curriculum it presents to high schools coincides largely with introductory-level college classes. Perhaps more importantly, the exams are graded such that an answer exhibiting broad knowledge but lacking both interpretive insight and persuasive argument will fail to earn a top score.
Whereas knowledge of science and mathematics seems to be on the rise among students matriculating at Princeton, their familiarity with some branches of the humanities has declined over the years. Yet faculty members do not necessarily see this as an impediment to their success at Princeton.
Knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin was once required for admission to Princeton. Classics professor Joshua Katz noted that now many students become very successful concentrators in his department having taken neither Greek nor Latin in high school.
Others in the department took these classes in high school, but had forgotten much of what they learned by the time they arrived. So much attention is given to the quality of instruction in 100-level language courses at Princeton, however, that Katz said he does not see this as a critical disadvantage.
History department chair Robert Tignor noted that students do not have the same fundamental knowledge of history that those of 25 or 30 years ago demonstrated. However, he attributes this less to a deficiency in secondary school education than to a shift in the outlook of historians.
"Forty years ago," Tignor explained, "the history of Europe and North America with a side glance at Latin America was studied." The old comprehensive examination for history concentrators, approximately 16 hours in length, sought to evaluate one's familiarity with an "agreed-upon historical narrative having little room for dissenting viewpoints."
Students arriving at Princeton now, Tignor believes, are more apt to see history as more than a set of facts and to realize that both the "agreed-upon historical narrative" and the exclusive focus on Europe and North America are misguided approaches to the subject. In other words, it would be difficult for high schools to provide the fundamental knowledge of 25 or 30 years ago because there is no longer as much agreement as to what facts, specifically, are worthy of emphasis.
Lack of analytic skills seems to be at the base of problems even in mathematics, which at the introductory level is not necessarily thought to be an especially interpretive pursuit. Mathematics professor Charles Fefferman noted that the United States tends to do comparatively poorly in the instruction of mathematics.
This, in large measure, he blames on teaching by mindless repetition. Too often, mathematical concepts are glossed over and students are shown only the steps they must undertake to solve problems of a certain variety.
Fefferman said he believes this leads to a deterioration of true understanding. "Not thinking is bad; it is too easy to learn by rote," he explained.
The observations of University administrators corroborate these findings. Dean of Forbes College John Hodgson noted that students are arriving with increased competence in mathematics and science, widely divergent proficiencies in foreign languages and an increasing need for added attention to their writing and analytic skills.
Like Bogan, Hodgson said he "gets the strong impression that there is not as much writing and attention to writing at high school as there was [previously]." Both suggest that the intense investment of time that the development of clear, well-argued writing demands makes it something that secondary schools sometimes no longer have the resources to teach properly, which is a major problem.
Most everyone acknowledges that developing certain fundamental skills — and writing in particular — in high school is imperative. Yet some are more hesitant in their response to the National Commission on the High School Senior Year's apparent view that secondary schools should begin to annex the expectations and curriculum of college classes. "Going to college," one faculty member at Princeton said, "should be a broadening experience — one that is new, different and exciting."
There is, in other words, much to be lost if high schools neglect to develop students' ability to reason and write well and instead force students to memorize material traditionally covered in introductory-level college courses without providing any deeper understanding of it.
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