LITTLE ROCK — Pulaski Technical College will be among the first two-year colleges in the state with minimum admissions requirements when it implements a new policy in the fall 2013 semester.
Under the rule, approved by the college’s board last week, applicants who score below a 13 on the reading portion of the ACT or a comparable college admissions test will be referred to adult-education centers to improve their literacy skills.
People who score in that range on the ACT test, which has a maximum score of 36, have the reading skills roughly equivalent to those of a child in the seventh grade, said Michael DeLong, executive vice president and provost at Pulaski Tech.
“The bottom line is we don’t want people to come here and basically waste their time and resources if they may not be cut out for this,” he said.
The change comes as campuses around the state implement policies aimed at helping them increase the number of students they graduate. A new performance funding model, which will tie some state appropriations to a college’s ability to retain students, has added incentive, campus leaders said.
A policy adopted by the Arkansas Higher Education Coordinating Board in October requires colleges and universities to “determine and establish a minimum feasible performance level” that will help them determine if students with low admissions test scores could be expected to succeed in noncredit remedial courses.
Pulaski Tech’s policy, part of the college’s “prepared learner initiative,” is a departure from the open-door general admissions policies in place at most of the state’s community colleges and many of its four-year universities.
Those institutions admit all high school graduate applicants, regardless of test scores, enrolling many of them in noncredit remediation courses before the students pursue normal degree plans.
Arkansas law says students who score below 19 in a given subject on the ACT or below an equivalent score on an equivalent test must take remedial courses in that subject to attend a public college or university in the state.
Of 23,176 students tested before admission to a public institution in the fall 2011 semester, 49.3 percent required remedial courses in at least one subject - math, English or reading, according to a January report by the Arkansas Department of Higher Education.
Leaders of the state’s colleges and universities have long said high enrollments of unprepared students can strain resources and lower graduation rates.
Remedial courses cost the state an estimated $51.9 million in the 2010-2011 academic year, according to the most recent data available from the Higher Education Department.
Nine out of 10 Pulaski Tech students require at least one remedial course, the college said.
The college’s policy focuses on reading ability because it extends into other subjects,leaders said.
“Students who are not reading proficiently - at the college level - experience real challenges succeeding in their course work,” Pulaski Tech President Margaret Ellibee said in a statement.
DeLong said Pulaski Tech has success in training remedial students and moving them into traditional courses, but students with poor reading skills often get frustrated and drop out before completing a course, accumulating debt without earning a degree.
The college expects about 400 students to be affected by the new requirement when it’s implemented next fall. Pulaski Tech, the largest community college in the state, enrolls about 12,000 students.
“To bring students up from the third-grade reading level - sometimes the first-grade reading level - to where they need to be to enter college, we just don’t have the resources for that,” DeLong said.
Arkansas, Pages 15 on 11/11/2012