The single greatest problem facing urban-oriented colleges and universities today is the urgent need of their students and potential students for help with basic skills. Not only do existing programs in the institutions need to be strengthened and expanded—and attitudes about the programs and the students changed—but also imaginative and unconventional approaches are needed in recruitment, testing, placement, counseling, and guidance. Even the teaching of basic skills themselves must be restructured. No less importantly, information about basic skills and related programs must be made more widely available, and in a form that will reach the inner-city poor and disadvantaged.

Broadly speaking, two populations should be the target of such efforts. One is made up of students in college who are having learning difficulties and whose problems are reflected most dramatically in high attrition rates. The other is made up of young people and adults—at work, in unemployment lines, on the streets, or even in the schools—who want and need further education but are discouraged from pursuing it because of their deficiencies in basic skills or accumulated frustrations from past learning failures. Both groups are diverse and ever changing; both present difficult challenges for educational institutions. The projects discussed below show the many ways urban-oriented institutions of higher education in six different city contexts are attempting to come to grips with the learning problems of these groups.

IN-SCHOOL YOUTH: MILES COLLEGE AND THE BIRMINGHAM SCHOOLS COOPERATE

In race relations, Birmingham, Alabama, has come a long way from the turmoil of the 1960s. Today it is a relatively peaceful city whose