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Backs Against the Wall
Basic skills and English-as-a-second-language programs should be strengthened and expanded to better serve both enrolled and potential students. Programs that are closely integrated with regular content courses should be emphasized.
Imaginative recruitment, testing, and placement programs should be launched in urban communities across the nation.
College, high school, and community-based counseling and guidance programs should be developed and expanded, with particular emphasis given to community-based efforts and to programs that integrate career, academic, financial, and psychological support.
Staff and faculty development programs should be undertaken to prepare the personnel to staff these instructional, recruitment, and counseling functions.
Inadequate planning is the prime factor restricting institutional capacity to develop basic skills programs and other services and to attract students to them. Therefore, we recommend that:
• Urban-oriented higher education institutions develop new institutional planning approaches as a first order of business.
These new planning programs should aim to do at least four things: (a) systematically identify groups in need of access to higher education; (b) assess their educational needs (taking into account that unserved students are not a homogeneous group); (c) reshape existing programs to make them more responsive to those needs; and (d) take account of local job-market realities. For the planning programs to be fully effective, they should be undertaken as part of a comprehensive reexamination of the institution's mission, involving a thorough reassessment of current educational priorities and criteria for allocating resources.
The development of learning programs for students with nontraditional needs requires the use of new theoretical knowledge about the different ways people learn. A higher level of research is needed to develop new instructional approaches and more effective means of both diagnosing learning problems and assessing learning achievement