What is high school for?

"The Office of Diversity and Inclusion Bridge Program [at The Ohio State University] assists incoming freshman with transitioning from high school to college by providing academic enrichment coursework, campus involvement, community integration, and peer mentoring. The enrichment coursework includes English, research, mathematics, psychology, economics, and calculus lab. Students also participate in study skills, career, and personal development workshops."

In 1982, 30 years ago, I had a temporary contract at the OSU Libraries to work with freshmen and undergrads at what was then "West Campus." (I have pretty good research skills, but can find no record of this financial boondoggle on the internet. I may have to ask a retired colleague.) In those days, the "bridge" was real; a bus drove the young students across the river to a special campus with fine Soviet, cereal box architecture (west campus is still there but now is primarily administrative offices) which would be user friendly with advisors and grad instructors on hand to help them adjust and make it to the next year. There was even a library there called "the learning center" instead of "library." It was to make the transition easier, not just for minorities, but for freshmen who had poor skills in math and English and might need some extra help. There was even an English lab or rhetoric workshop (forgotten it's name) tucked away on another level of the West Campus Learning Center.

I think the state was proposing stricter standards for elementary and high schools, but apparently the university is still offering make-up work for the kids so that enrollment stats look better. The graduation rate from our big city high schools is poor. Don't know what the graduation rate is for a minority student who comes on campus as a freshman so unprepared for college level work, that the first year is spent catching up. Probably FERPA covers their tail on this.

The Office of Diversity and Inclusion complies with the rules set forth by the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) with regard to student personal and academic information. The Office of Diversity and Inclusion, Academic Advancement Services, utilizes the web based scheduling system, GradesFirst, to schedule retention counseling and tutoring appointments, track student participant’s academic progress, communicate with program participants, ODI staff and university professors, and generate program affiliated reports. AAS staff will utilize academic information acquired from The Ohio State University and program participants for these purposes. Student personal and academic information housed on Gradesfirst is secure and will not be shared outside of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

If anyone has some statistics on this, or even a web site I can link to about the old West Campus of the 1980s, I'd appreciate it.