To preface this discussion, we concede the state we live and teach in has many problems; for many years our state's educational prowess has ranked us at the bottom, or near the bottom, in almost every standard measure of educational achievement and funding. From the outset we recognize that our students are taught by some of the poorest paid teachers in the country, in some of the worst funded schools in the nation, and that many of these students are in fact all that are left, given the fact that many of their former classmates have already dropped out. Frankly, we recognize all too well that many of our students (as many as 50 percent) graduate high school and come to our open-admissions state-funded university to immediately enroll in as many as two years of developmental studies courses; these students have graduated high school but are still judged deficient in writing, reading, and/or math skills, based on standardized test scores and placement tests. We recognize that our state now gives full tuition scholarships to students on the basis of standardized test scores and high school grade-point averages that in other states would consign these same students instantly to developmental studies programs. We recognize that things are bad here! But, frankly, we have also taught in several other states across the nation, and we recognize sadly that many entering college students' writing skills are not much better in other areas of the country either. Why?

A NATION'S LATERAL MOVEMENT: NEEDED INCLUSION

Two major socio-political events took place in the in the middle of the twentieth century that changed the face of higher education in the United States of America, and both events gave rise to and helped propel the open admissions college and university.

First, with the introduction of the GI Bill, the United States took a giant educational lateral step in our educational journey. Before this introduction, this country was like most others in the industrialized world in that university education was a privilege of the rich, the well-heeled, or the religiously affiliated. Until the introduction of the GI Bill, university students were mainly male, white, and of Anglo-Saxon stock. Women, of course, had colleges to attend (and co-ed colleges/universities did prosper before the GI Bill), but again only those women for the most part of a particular social class attempted higher education. This same social class had by and large been educated in a similar fashion, with a reasonably secure cannon of knowledge and religion, and a relatively homogeneous student body and curriculum. A German hybrid of a British education structure was the most common approach, and frankly, the trivium, or a form of it, was the cornerstone of this curriculum. Great books, lots of reading and writing, studies in rhetoric, grammar (supplemented with Latin or Greek instruction) and logic prepared these students for advanced studies at universities. The students who entered these universities had much in common, not least a common-ish high school curriculum. So, university enrollees of a bygone era were homogeneous. They had basically studied the same types of subjects to the same levels, and the admissions procedure assumed this as fact. This is not to say that students' academic weaknesses have not been decried by their academic masters for centuries, but these declarations of woe certainly pale under our contemporary problems--the university before open admissions was a very different institution after open admissions. The GI Bill helped provide access to higher education for a new class of citizens in American society. The working-to-lower-middle class, traditionally excluded from higher education, came home from World War II eager to enroll and improve their lot in the society they had so valiantly defended. With this rapid increase in enrollment, our nation's campuses also began to burst at the seams. One need only go to an admissions office on any public college or university to explore their yearbooks from the late forties and early fifties to see the measures that had to be taken just to house these many new enrollees. Of course, curricula had to be modified. A young working-class soldier returning after service was not the same academically as the middle- and upper-class highly educated prospective attendee the curriculum has been designed for. However, what these new students lacked in the classics, they certainly made up for in maturity (these veterans were our first nontraditional students), career pragmatism (note the rise in Colleges of Engineering, Science, and Business, and the relative decline in Colleges of Arts, Humanities, and Classics), and work ethic (many of these same veterans had families to support, in cramped living conditions, and with very little extra money) while trying to gain this education. In addition, as universities began to modify curricula to meet these new students' needs, it became clear that more teaching resources would need to be directed toward the earlier college years to bring many of these new arrivals up to the levels of their more traditional classmates. More support courses were needed and offered--tutoring in English composition, in the form of writing labs, began to appear.