At face value, this grand experiment to educate all our citizens with as much education as they wanted was intrinsically a novel approach. We had left our European counterparts behind; we were attempting to change higher education from a meritocratic privilege for some to a democratic right for all--and this philosophical change describes how higher education in open admissions state colleges and universities has been administered ever since. Basically, students can enroll in an open admissions college or university as long as they (1) find enough funding for tuition and living expenses through federal and/or state loans/scholarships, work study, athletic scholarships, academic scholarships, private means, and others; and (2) meet minimum academic standards or take a series of developmental academic subjects to elevate them to requisite levels of performance. What this actually means for many students is that the high school diploma can be replaced with a GED; high school itself can be replaced with home schooling, standardized tests such as the ACT or SAT can be taken casually, if at all, and a series of institution-specific placement tests can take the place of these standardized tests for admission purposes. Simply stated, students now wishing to gain access to higher education can attend a community college or an open admissions four-year institution with very little academic preparation in their high school careers.

So the noble dream of access to a quality higher education for all who can benefit from it has turned into the nightmare of access to remedial repetition of work these students did not sufficiently acquire in their high-school years. These students are essentially paying for (or the taxpayers are paying for) remedial work to prepare them to take college-level work. This is their right, and open admissions colleges and universities must, by law, provide instruction for these students. Our institutions of higher education are complicit in this national scam--we readily admit students whom we know have little chance of advancing very far in our universities; moreover, we are quick to flaunt our enrollment figures if they are going up, but very quiet about our retention figures or our figures on percentages of students in developmental education courses.

WHO THESE STUDENTS ARE

Each year, immediately after high school graduation, students entering our university discover to their great dismay that their 3.0 (and above) grade point averages, their inclusion in the Who's Who in American High Schools, their letter jackets in basketball, their volunteer work at the local hospital, their honors courses, and the fact that they were heavily recruited by all the state colleges and universities can't save them from having to enroll in a battery of developmental reading and writing courses. The one relative measure of their high school career, the one nationally normed test they take, the ACT test, places them, without much fanfare, right in the middle of the developmental range. These developmental courses, in this case courses in reading and writing, usually a year-long sequence of very-basic-to-somewhat-basic courses, are for a sizable number of these students, all they will ever see of college.

Each year, we initially blame their high school teachers--how could these people have been allowed to graduate from high school so deficient in these major skills? But, this finger-pointing soon ceases as the semester begins--there is not enough time for finger-pointing when you have twenty-five to thirty students in each class, four classes per semester, and very few of these students want to be here, or understand why they are there in remedial classes in the first place. After all, they passed English in high school, and they can read already! These students, no matter how much we would like to buy our university's public relations brochures, are not very nontraditional; they are, as we noted earlier, instead generally eighteen-year-olds fresh from their high school graduations. Nevertheless, their standardized scores place them in developmental studies courses and a few regular admissions courses, although it is not clear how anyone really believes that a student placed into Developmental Reading and/or Writing and concurrently enrolled in Survey of American History to 1865 will actually survive (this person generally does not).

Developmental Writing students have yet to master appropriate paragraphing, essay writing, and rudimentary proofreading skills. Many write below the eighth-grade level, and most have not written an entire essay in high school--or at least what their college instructors might call an essay. Developmental Reading students read below the eighth-grade level. This means that they can barely understand an article in USA Today, let alone understand the most rudimentary college text. Add to this that most of these students have no study skills habits, no time management skills, and very little realistic chance of success in college--yet they keep coming and coming and coming!

In an open admissions college/university, many students who are judged more proficient than their developmental studies counterparts enter our first-year composition classes with only slightly better skills. These are students, who, by and large, have had average--although with rampant grade inflation their grades are far from average--high school academic experiences. Some have written essays and some have even completed the dreaded book report, a few have written research papers (some even had to type them), and some had to (were forced into) take honors classes of the AP variety but their scores were vaguely reported, if the tests were even attempted. It seems very clear that composition scholars at prestigious doctoral-granting institutions need to be aware that these students are not the same as the mythical ones they think inhabit all composition classrooms all over North America.

Indeed, over the years, through a series of questionnaires, we have collected some observations about these students.

They do not read. Most of our students do not take a daily newspaper, read a weekly magazine, or a monthly periodical. They know people who read, at least they have noted one of their parents or guardians reading in the last six weeks, but a surprising number report that there is no newspaper in their home. At college, they make no use of the general periodicals and newspapers in the library unless forced to for an assignment, and many students could not name a newspaper from a city one hour away. In their dorms, they sometimes glance at teen/fashion magazines and sports magazines, but they don't claim this to be real reading for the most part--they look at the pictures a great deal! The vast majority of our entering first-year composition students have never read a novel!

They watch television. Most of our students claim to watch at least four hours of television a day, but many others consider this a conservative estimate. We, like most colleges and universities today, offer students living in residence halls a wide array of cable television channels, educational television offerings, and now their own twenty-four-hour movie channel system for their extracurricular entertainment. One could only hazard a guess as to whether the library budget has kept pace with the incremental increases in entertainment budgets for our charges!

They are employed. Many of our students come to college with pickup truck and car loans, and they must find or keep jobs to help pay off these vehicles. This is not the same type of student for whom "daddy and mommy" buy a car for graduation--these kids have had cars since they were sixteen and seventeen because in rural northern Louisiana and eastern Texas a car or truck is a necessity. We don't have much in the way of public transport and we don't have cabs at all. Other students must find work immediately because they come from lower income families and, while tuition and room and board might be paid for through loans and scholarships, incidental living expenses and truck/car loans are not! These students work three to five hours a day--often late into the night or early morning to pay for these necessities.

They play sports, hangout, and "party." Many of our student respondents claim to spend at least two hours a day playing sports, three hours just "hanging out" with their friends in the dorms or in apartments, and most claim to have already consumed alcohol to excess since arriving on campus. Much has been written recently about drug and alcohol excesses on college campuses, and the illnesses and lost time students undergo because of this overindulgence is truly staggering. Recently in Louisiana, we have had a number of students seriously hurt with binge drinking, but frankly we will never know how many students we do lose to this excess.

They are not all computer literate. While some of these students do surf the web and make use of e-mail accounts, many more do not have the skills to avail themselves of this technology. True, our open computer labs are generally full, but when we start looking at time spent in these labs it soon becomes clear that many of these students are only sending and reading e-mail a great deal of the time--not actually writing academic papers! Most of these students have limited typing skills, many still exhibit computerphobia, and many still have their mothers type (and persumably edit/proofread) their papers. Many of these students do not have access to a computer in the home, and many still view the computer with distrust. However, others are beginning to use the web for their research purposes more often than they use the traditional library, and this research strategy is one that many college instructors will have to adapt to: we are now seeing more cases of plagiarism from the web than ever before, and perhaps more important, we are now seeing students quote accurately and honestly from web sites that are just plain incorrect! With so many people now having the skills to put text on the web, our students now are even more lost as to what might or might not be factual information than they were with the traditional library resources of yesteryear.

WHAT THESE STUDENTS KNOW

On average half of our first year composition students surveyed don't know how many states there are in the US, while 85 percent could not name all of them in fifty minutes. Ninety percent of the students don't know the dates of either the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, or the Viet Nam conflict--many are not even clear in which century these events occurred and which nations were involved. Most students could not name the last five presidents of the United States; many could not name the capitals of Iran and Iraq, countries featured on television for many years. None of our students could accurately place England, Russia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Australia on a map, and a surprising number (60 percent) had difficulty differentiating between Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico.

Most of our students could not name a living novelist if John Grisham were disallowed. Most could not name a play other than one written by William Shakespeare. Most could not name a living poet, and most could not name a black writer and his/her work. Our students don't know three lines of any poem, cannot recognize book titles of even the biggest literary stars, and most have never been to a play--although many have seen Cats two and three times!

Our students have no idea about their own local history. In alarming numbers they don't know when their state became a state, they don't know who the last governor of the state was, they don't know who the last vice president of the United States was, and perhaps most ironic for professors teaching in the Deep South with its deep memories, most of our students cannot accurately (within ten years) tell us about the American Civil War (many believe this event occurred in the early twentieth century). These students know nothing of current politics--unsure who is a Democrat, who is a Republican, unsure in what parts of the world Bosnia or Tibet are located, having seemingly never heard of Yeltsin, Stalin, Marx, or Lenin. They know next to nothing about the Constitution of the United States, and cannot differentiate between Martin Luther and Martin Luther King.

However, these students do know who Oasis is, who Tupac Shakur was, who Seven of Nine is, who Dennis Rodman is; they know what the Taco Bell dog says, and they know all the slang terms for drugs. These students are vitally aware of sports scores and sports trivia, and they know the latest actors' biographies, including their most recent loves and divorces. They can tell the plots of most of the soap operas shown every day, and they know who Letterman's guests were last night.

HOW WE CAME TO THIS SITUATION

Concerns about such surveys of students' current knowledge quickly move to question their validity, but almost as quickly these concerns move to ask whose fault is it? Well, we believe with all our intellectual might that understanding something of Martin Luther King's life and struggle is more important, more culturally relevant, and more academically responsible than being able to name the members of the British pop group Oasis. We believe with all our might that not knowing that we have fifty states in our country is much more reprehensible than knowing that Antonio Banderas is married to Melanie Griffith. We believe with all our might that we have reached an incredibly sad state of affairs when our entering college students don't know which century the Second World War took place in, who the Allied and Axis forces were, and what the results of this war were; moreover, we find it doubly ironic and galling that one of these results was the fact that many of these grandparents were finally able to go to college, move up in social class, and eventually allow their grandchildren the luxury of their own ignorance!

However, the key point here is that these are not the students at whom composition theorists have aimed their theories and designed their overly politicized mission-statements about the purpose of first-year writing. These are not students who can "resist" dominant discourses even if they knew what that meant. These are not students who will explore alternative discourses to subvert the dominant power discourse. These are not students who can take part in a Marxist-inspired curriculum; these students don't know who the Marx brothers were, let alone Karl! These are not the students who will quickly develop women's ways of knowing, feminist perspectives on language, or be able to unpack a Friereian perspective on the oppressed; these are students who are barely holding on linguistically, and have yet to gain much knowledge about the world around them. These students cannot interact meaningfully with this politicization even if they wanted to! The theorists exemplify yet another case of not practicing what they preach--audience awareness. We have little faith that these approaches are even what First-Year Composition is intended to be in any case, and we believe that students trained in these approaches will not be successful in the types and genres of writing that they will face later in their careers.

THE ALARM BELLS ARE SOUNDING

More and more states are requiring departments within colleges and universities to be able to show accountability for what it is that we claim to be imparting to these students, and what they can actually demonstrate competence in. Ironically, English departments are rhetorically suspect in claiming their graduates are prepared adequately in various areas; in reality we know English departments are producing a very flawed, unemployable, yet certified competent, product.

As more and more students leave colleges and universities, having attained very high grades and very impressive-sounding degrees, but, unfortunately, limited applicable knowledge, limited marketable abilities, and limited workforce communication skills, society is beginning to question the extreme difference between the academics' perception of curricular theory and the graduates' demonstration of actual performance.

Another illustration of this practice is when literature professors claim that their students will, through a complete survey of "great books" readings, the acquisition of critical approaches to various genres, and the ability to approach and "unpack" literatures from a variety of critical frameworks (feminist, Marxist, deconstructionist, post-structuralist, and others) be able to transfer those skills in a variety of careers. Employers would beg to differ. Hence, we see a split between a curricular emphasis in theory and in practice.