More Kansas students will now qualify for admission at Emporia, Fort Hays, Pittsburg and Wichita State Universities. The more rigorous high school academic curriculum was jettisoned for an average high school grade point average (GPA) and a minimal score on the ACT. The rationale for lowering standards focuses on making the process simpler and increasing the number of students who go to college.
The ACT score remains the same as in prior standards. Required high school GPA is now 2.25, except for K-State (3.25) while the University of Kansas will require either an ACT score of 21 and a GPA of 3.25, or an ACT score of 24 and a GPA of 3.0.
The more rigorous Qualified Admissions (QA) high school curriculum, as well as being in the top third of your graduating class, was eliminated across all universities.
While nearly all KBOR discussion was focused on admissions to regents universities and comparisons with a few other state’s requirements, the major impact will be a drop in rigor of high school math and science curricula taught in Kansas high schools.
While I have been a severe critic of better-education-through-paperwork because qualified teachers and not written plans are the answer, Qualified Admissions (QA) standards that went into effect in 2001 were effective. QA caused an immediate shortage of science teachers. Any biology teacher who could add a chemistry or physics endorsement moved to teaching those courses that were mandated by QA. Those shortages continue today. QA also contributed to re-defining teacher licensure, elimination of home economics and shop classes as a “science,” and eliminated a watered down high school “general science” class.
QA also required four high school math courses (or ACT score) rather than three under KSDE requirements for a high school diploma. That fourth math requirement was not widely met. So the Kansas chief academic officers got an end run approved so students could take the fourth math at college. This was but one of many actions that diluted academic rigor in Kansas.
The regents recently forced higher education bachelors programs to reduce down to 120 credit hours. Civilization moves ahead in education requirements over the years (a medical doctor in the 1850s only required two years of college). So academic faculty had good reason to require more education. But the regents first requested and then demanded a reduction of bachelors degrees to 120 credit hours. If any other similar program in Kansas was just 120 hours, all must drop to that level.
This race to the bottom continued over many years as the regent’s committee on transfer and articulation pressured universities to accept transfer courses that had the same name but varied greatly in prerequisites and mode of delivery.
Now high school GPA will be critical. But there has no mention made about how high school GPA, while previously the best predictor of college success, has been rapidly and miraculously increasing, raising high school graduation rates from under 70 percent to over 85 percent, while scores on NAEP, SAT and ACT remain flat or fall. This “Lake Wobegone Effect” (where all children are above average) is making high school GPA less predictive.
The Board of Regents functions much like a corporate board. Unlike the Kansas State Board of Education, KBOR has not held open public forums for over a decade, an avenue where the impacts of QA on K–12 coursework and teacher training could have been discussed. And Kansas presidents and provosts appear more focused on sustaining tuition than defending academic rigor.
These Kansas actions mirror similar actions across other states where higher education bodies or legislatures are likewise lowering requirements to attend state colleges and reducing academic rigor. Many states have followed California in removing the college requirement for college algebra (except for math and science majors) because that course is a factor in many students not completing college. Some states are removing algebra from high school requirements for the same reason.
For decades, American families who host overseas K–12 students from Europe and Asia have noted how those visiting students are several grades ahead of U.S. students in math and science, and likewise how difficult it is for American students to survive at the same grade level in foreign schools. However, there has historically been more equivalency between American and foreign students at the university level, particularly when American creativity is pitted against rote memorization. However, No Child Left Behind teaching-to-the-test has reduced that American advantage at the university level.
Actions being taken by higher education governing bodies across the United States, primarily to feed more students into a university system now more reliant on tuition dollars, ensure that many future American students will lag behind foreign students at the collegiate level. International education conferences already see hallway discussions of concern about the value of the American undergraduate college degree from our non-selective public universities and online diploma mills.
Hopefully, with the Qualified Admissions curriculum gone, Kansas will not return to offering science credit for home economics. But this action does dismiss any need for chemistry and physics in the many small Kansas schools that barely offer a 1930s curriculum and should be consolidated. This regents’ action in Kansas is a symptom of America’s widespread educational race to the bottom.
John Richard Schrock is a professor at Emporia State University.