"We're rewarding the wrong types of behavior, Oakley said (Fain, 2011)."

Eloy Oakley's comment, as president of Long Beach City College, is in response to a new initiative in the state of California to shift the focus in enrollment and student retention in Higher Education - and specifically in Community Colleges - to a more performance-based model.

The state of California is well known for it emphasis on access as the first and foremost priority in Higher Education. Last year a bill was passed which required the California educational system to create a "Task Force on Student Success (Fain, 2011)." In their report this year, the Task Force found that one of the key loads on California's system was the emphasis on access irregardless of student performance. Their recommendation? Give students who demonstrate academic success based on completion and other "success metrics" priority in
enrollment, advising and other services. (Fain, 2011)

In Student Affairs, one of the causes most commonly championed is increasing access to education. The rationale, which one of the members of California's Task Force - David
Rattray - calls "the ideal" is that this is America and the more open-access we provide to education the greater Higher Education embodies and serves as the vehicle for the American Dream. "In an ideal world, community colleges would grant equal opportunities to all students regardless of their academic preparation...In the real world it's not working (Fain quoting Rattray, 2011)"

President Obama, in his recent speech to the Auraria Campus student body and faculty, was proud of the fact that - by executive order - they have eliminated subsidized student loans. When I asked my students what their thoughts were about this, they had no idea what the ramifications of this would be for them. Most of the Student Affairs professionals reading this will have already seen the critical failing of this premature action. While it does eliminate federal subsidies which are paid to private sector financial institutions - a popularist move with the electorate in the run-up to an election year (given the wildfire growth of Occupy Movement) - the subsidies paid to banks served a function for students who receive these loans: interest
does not start to accrue until six months after they are out of school. Without subsidized student loans, the end-cost of an education goes up. Now, one of our colleagues mentioned to me that when more widespread student loan forgiveness kicks in it won't matter - but thus far, it hasn't. Movement on that initiative is stalled in Washington to say the least.

Proceding, then, from these facts... Remedial education goes hand-in-hand with increasing access to education. Students are mandated to take classes for which they receive no college credit but which are intended to prepare them for academic success. While remedial education certainly serves a much needed purpose (and my own livelihood and that of many of my colleagues is largely derived from teaching such courses) the issue comes to a head when one casts remedial education into the light of these recent changes. Unless loan forgiveness becomes a fact, not only will these students spend as much as an additional year or even two in their educational programs, the interest on these loans will begin accrueing - the end cost of the degrees students in these programs receive will be higher on two counts.

The California proposal promotes a number of measures which could, potentially, narrow access. The report questions, "Is it enough to provide access to education without the policies and practices that ensure students succeed in meeting their educational goals?...The answer is simply that we can no longer be satisfied with providing students open access and limited success (Fain, 2011)."

With the escalating cost of an education, and the ever tightening pool of resources allocated to Higher Education, questions are beginning to be raised about how we can optimize Institutional resources and those of our students. For the California community college system (which had to turn away nearly 150,000 students last year due to budget cuts) it seems this includes reconsidering the real-world ramifications of freely open access. (Fain, 2011)

I, myself, am perpetually perplexed over the real-world ramifications of completely open access. We can provide access and funding - but not all students are prepared to succeed in an academic environment. We can provide them classes which will "prepare" them - but they won't receive credit towards their degree from these classes - the cost of which is often the same as normal classes (or not much less) and the added time spent in securing an education means their students loans will accrue interest for that much longer. There just doesn't seem to be an easy ethical answer. We can try to change the system - but systems only changes but slowly and it is difficult to anticipate what could be severe consequences to even the most minute adjustment.

~David Dorr