College in Modern America: Preparation for College Writing at Michigan State University Centuries ago, hope for economic

and social mobility lay in removing oneself from the monarchical and feudalistic traditions of the Old World and settling in the United States. Millions of immigrants flocked to large cities like New York and Boston, lured by the prospect of a nation that was governed by the people, for the good of the people. By the nineteenth century, however, the United States East Coast was beginning to look increasingly like the world those millions of immigrants left behind. Impoverished masses worked in the factories that were springing up in major cities across the northeast, and these poor laborers were subjected to horrific working conditions while the rich landowning class reaped the benefits. It seemed as though the New World was created in the spitting image of the one European American immigrants thought they had left behind forever on the other side of the Atlantic. Many left the nations rapidly crowding and industrializing East coast and blazed westward trails through Americas largely unknown heartland to seek their fortunes beside the mighty Pacific. For these individuals and their families, unrestricted freedom of choice as well as the promise of socioeconomic mobility could no longer be found in the East, so they went West. Todays youth look not to Americas open spaces, but in the direction of our colleges and universities. For post-World War II era Americans, college is the key that will unlock ones dreams. Following World War II, the United States, getting used to its new position as the worlds premier superpower, paid for an unprecedented number of war veterans to further themselves by pursuing vocational training or college degrees. According to Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, authors of Capitalist Schooling in America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, this governmental push for higher education follows the logic that within the

free-enterprise system of the United States significant social progress can only be achieved through a combination of enlightened persuasion and governmental initiative, particularly in the spheres of education and vocational training (Bowles and Gintis 4). By the late 1950s, a third of the late adolescent age group was attending college; just ten years later that fraction had risen to almost half (Bowles and Gintis 4). As of 2008, 68.6% of all high school graduates in the United States were enrolled in college, a figure which, in part, can be attributed to the fact that there are more second- and third-generation college students than there has ever been, with these families encouraging their children to attend college rather than pursue other options right out of high school (howtoedu.org). The attainment of a college education, despite the sharp rise in college enrollment over the past fifty years, is not directly correlated with a rise in individual student cognitive ability or achievement. A study by Bowles and Gintis reveals that individuals in the 90th percentile in social class background are likely to receive five more years of education than an individual from the 10th percentile. It is also indicated that the same individual in the 90th percentile is likely to receive an average of 4.25 more years of schooling than an individual with an identical IQ from the 10th percentile, illustrating the fact that general individual intelligence does less to ensure you a spot in college than does a high social class background (Bowles and Gintis 30-31). Undoubtably correlated is the fact that, at the elementary and secondary levels of schooling, a child whose parents are in the top 20% of income distribution receives roughly twice the educational resources in dollar terms as does a child whose parents are in the bottom 20% (Bowles and Gintis 30-31). While it is common knowledge that holding a college degree does not

guarantee you a job anymore, it certainly helps and increases the chance that you will be able to afford to send your children to college one day. The United States, in an effort to combat stratification of educational opportunity, has done much in the way of helping students from low-income backgrounds get to college, notably by providing grants and other forms of federal financial aid that make a college education an economically viable option for these groups. Once these students get to college, however, universities and other post-secondary institutions have to work to ensure that these students have the skills necessary to succeed in college. A common means of ensuring that all students are up to code, so to speak, are remedial courses taken at the university level. These courses are comprised of students that deserve admission to college based on all of the criteria the institutions use, but are still considered marginal, or at risk, to use common administrative terminology. Preparation for College Writing courses, usually referred to as PCW courses, offered at Michigan State University are an example of these types of remedial programs. If university admissions officials decide that an applicant deserves admission but they have an ACT English score of 18 or less, they are automatically placed in a PCW course for extra instruction. At MSU, it is mandatory that students deemed at risk successfully complete these courses as a prerequisite for the Tier-1 writing requirement at Michigan State, which determines that all undergraduates, no matter what their discipline, are capable of satisfactory college-level academic writing. The credits earned in PCW classes do not count towards any degree; if university administration deems that a student has to enroll in a PCW course, they will need a minimum of 124 credits to graduate instead of the 120 required of students who do not need to do remedial coursework. As of 2013, it cost $428.75

per credit for in-state students at Michigan State University. This means that it costs students approximately $1715 to enroll in a semester-long PCW course before they can move on to the Tier-1 writing courses that actually count towards their degrees. In other words, PCW students have to spend $1715 on skills that most of their peers learned in public schools for free. Historically, and perhaps predictably based on the findings of Bowles and Gintis mentioned above, the students who comprised Michigan States PCW classes were generally from the lower end of the United States economic hierarchy, and therefore in many cases did not have the same access to high quality educational resources as their more affluent peers. In 2008, 38.08% of all students enrolled in PCW courses were recipients of the Federal Pell Grant, which provides need-based aid to low-income undergraduate and certain post baccalaureate students to promote access to postsecondary education (ed.gov). Since during any given year between 2008 and 2013, Pell recipients comprise between 15.13 and 20.53% of the total student body, it goes without saying that not all Pell Grant recipients need remedial instruction (in fact, the majority do not). However, very few, if any, classrooms at MSU have as high a percentage of Pell recipients as could be found in PCW classes in 2008; a fact that indicates, in an admittedly obscure way, how economically disadvantaged school districts have a harder time preparing their students for success in college. Though this 38.08% of Pell grant recipients would not have been the majority of a typical PCW class in 2008, those students were probably the single most highly represented demographic. Moreover, PCW Pell grant recipients, as a whole, tended to struggle more than non-recipients in those classes. In 2008, Pell recipients in PCW received a mean grade of 2.9084 while their peers received a notably higher mean grade of 3.4762. The relatively vast difference

in mean grades received by recipients and non-recipients of Pell grants illustrates a common trend at work in the United States: individuals from lower income backgrounds tend to be less equipped than their more affluent peers for academic reading and writing at the college level. The blame cannot be placed on the students ambition or natural intelligence. They simply were denied educational resources at the primary level that others had access to. Michigan State, one of the largest public universities in the nation, offers a number of additional support programs for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds in an effort to make a quality university education an attainable option to all students, no matter what their background. Generally speaking, the more support programs a student is involved in, the more in need they are. In 2008, 82% of all first generation PCW students were involved in more than one of these support programs, which is another indication that these PCW courses were part of the Universitys effort to improve educational chances for all types of students; one would be hard pressed to find that high a percentage of students receiving substantial support enrolled in a typical course at MSU. Further evidence that students hailing from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds were not given the same educational resources, generally speaking, in the communities they came from is the fact that PCW students that were involved in no support programs received a mean grade of 3.4483; students involved in one MSU support program received a markedly lower mean grade of 3.0204; and the mean grade of students involved in two MSU support programs is a significantly lower 2.3200. These statistics highlight the fact that the lower your socioeconomic background, the more likely your primary education did not teach you the skills necessary for success in the high levels of education that are now considered a mandatory touchstone for social and economic mobility in this nation.

Viewed in this light, it seems that MSUs PCW classes were the ticket to a higher education for many students who would have otherwise either been denied admission to college, or struggled with university-level writing classes, had they not been given resources at MSU to improve their writing skills before moving on to the Tier-1 requirement. The educational institution, it seemed, was finally beginning to level the playing field and granting all students the resources needed for success in this country as it is generally conceived. Over the past several years, however, the demographic profile of students that enroll in PCW classes has changed dramatically. In the past, over one third of students enrolled in PCW classes were first generation college students who were born in the United States, evidence being that 38.08% of PCW students in 2008 were recipients of federal aid that is exclusively available to U.S. citizens and eligible non-citizens, such as refugees, green card holders, and citizens of U.S. controlled territories like American Samoa. In sharp contrast to the historical make-up of PCW classes is the fact that as of Spring Semester 2013, 86% of all PCW students were born in China, while only 3.41% were born in the United States. In other words, in 2008, 131 out of the total 344 students enrolled in PCW courses were U.S.-born and, additionally, from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. In 2013, however, the number of U.S.-born students fell dramatically to a meager 14 out of a total of 411 students. Conservatively, one would think that there should be at least 100 more American students enrolled in PCW courses based on the figures from 2008. Upon reviewing this information, one naturally wonders how such a dramatic shift in the student make-up of PCW classes has occurred in the past five years. In the years between 2004 and 2013, Michigan State University received and processed about the same number of applications from Michigan residents: between approximately 16,500

and 17,500 applications. We can safely assume that the majority of Michigan States first generation students, and students from the lower rungs of the United States socioeconomic ladder, are Michigan residents because attending college at a public university in ones home state is significantly less expensive than attending an out-of-state or private institution. While the number of applications from Michigan residents has remained basically stable in the years between 2004 and 2013, the number of those accepted has not. In 2004, MSU received over 16,500 applications from Michigan residents for Fall Semester 2005. About 47% of those who applied ended up enrolling in the University, which made MSUs entering class in 2005 consist of 87.8% Michigan residents. Flash forward to 2012, and MSU received about the same number of applications from Michigan residents, but only about 38% were accepted and enrolled, which translated into a 2013 entering class made up of only 68.2% Michigan residents. The numbers above, from 2004 and 2013, are not anomalies: in every year since 2004, Michigan States entering class is made up of about 3% less Michigan residents than the year before. In just nine years, the percentage of Michigan residents in entering classes has decreased by 19.6%. It seems that it is getting much harder for people from Michigan to get into Michigan State. Despite the fact that in-state enrollment has dropped dramatically in the past decade or so, the overall size of the entering class has remained relatively consistent, with about 9,000 eager eyed freshman moving to East Lansing each year. While it has gotten harder for Michigan residents to be admitted to MSU, things have remained relatively the same for applicants from states other than Michigan; MSUs entering classes in the years between 2004 and 2013 have always been made up of between about 8.5 and 10.5% out-of-state students. What has changed

since 2004, however, is the amount of international students, particularly those from China, that are admitted to the University. In 2004, just 14 out of 8,922 freshman were from China, a minuscule .16% of the entering class. That percentage has, without fail, increased dramatically every year since 2004. In 2008, 5.63% of the entering class was from China; in 2010, the entering class was 9.16% Chinese; and by 2013, Chinese students accounted for nearly 17% of the entire entering class at Michigan State University. So, while the amount of students from Michigan has dropped by 19.6% since 2004, the amount of students from China has risen almost 17%. It seems that MSU is closing the door to thousands of in-state applicants while opening it wider for international applicants in what appears to be a concerted effort to change the student profile of the University. What has happened for in-state applicants to MSU is a bottlenecking affect. The same number of applications from Michigan residents floods the Office of Admissions every year, but not as many are accepted as there would have been in years past. Michigan State, despite accepting roughly the same number of Pell Grant recipients, only takes the most competitive instate applications. This means that students who come from highly disadvantaged economic (and therefore, more often than not, educational) backgrounds, the same students who in 2008 had a mean grade of 2.3 in PCW classes and were involved in two MSU support programs, are not given the same acceptance chances as they were in years past: they simply do not measure up in a more competitive applicant pool. Michigan State can accept less Americans who receive 18 or below on their English ACTs than they had to in the past because they accept less in-state applications in general, which translates to far less first generation American students in PCW classes so that there is enough room for Chinese students who pay a much higher price than in-

state students to attend the University. Viewed in this light, the educational institution is behaving more like a money hungry corporation than an engine of social justice that could have helped to put a stop to stratification in the United States. Year MI Resident Applications Received* Total Enrollment of Entering Class (FS Only) % MI Residents of Total Entering Class %Non-MI Residents of Total Entering Class %Chinese Students of Total Entering Class 0.16% 8,928 8,905 8,862 8,977 8,949 8,839 9,461 10,132 9,658 87.8% 84.97% 82.95% 79.2% 76.31% 77.01% 74.12% 70.43% 68.2% 8.63% 10.1% 10.13% 9.89% 10.1% 9.61% 10.2% 10.4% 10.79% 0.123% 0.65% 1.975% 5.63% 8.805% 9.16% 11.56% 15.23% 16.94%

2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

16,621 16,653 16,719 17,380 17,682 16,920 17,305 17,567 16,926