A stunning 77.6 percent of NYC public-high-school graduates who entered CUNY community colleges as freshmen last fall needed remediation in math, reading or writing, new data show.
Despite their high-school diplomas, the grads failed CUNY admission tests in one or more of the key subjects, officials told The Post.
The only good news: The number of unprepared city grads dipped a modest 1.7 percentage points from 2012, when 79.3 percent of entering students needed to bone up on basics.
In releasing the damning data, CUNY cited success with a pre-community-college program it started four years ago to tackle the flood of unready students.
“CUNY Start” takes mostly high-school grads who fail at least two admission tests. They agree to postpone enrollment for up to six months to focus on raising their skills. Upon completion, about 70 percent pass a test they failed before, and 48 percent become “fully proficient,” or college ready, officials said Friday.
The abundance of ill-prepared grads is cited as evidence that city schools have handed out credits like candy to push kids along and out.
“The remediation rate is way too high because the Bloomberg administration put graduation over proficiency with an epidemic of online credit recovery and other strategies that shortchanged students,” said Brooklyn College education professor David Bloomfield. “They give press conferences touting the graduation rate, then offload the costs — money, time and effort — onto CUNY and these students.”
New York has adopted the Common Core standards, a set of skills kids should learn from kindergarten to 12th grade, to prepare for college. But the Board of Regents says it won’t require college-ready test scores until 2022.