The September 2010 issue of U.S. News & World Report takes a heavy focus on college in 2010. Let’s be honest- this is not the best time in our Nation’s history to be attending college; budget cuts and unemployment aren’t helping, and students are going to be the ones to suffer. What may be even more disturbing than the budget cuts to our major universities, however, is the quality of student attempting to attend. Students are not coming in with the preparation and analytical ability they once had. Carol Frey writes in her article “Crash Course in Preparedness,” Many students are arriving on campus with few tools to succeed. Of the high school students in the class of 2009 who took the ACT test, for example, fewer than one quarter met each of the benchmarks for college readiness in math, science, English, and reading. Just over a quarter met none of them. The cause? This is a harder one to determine. Frey suspects it is from a lack of quality reading: books that give an analytical approach, essentially taking the reader through the motions of forming an argument and actually seeing it through. More and more often, students are citing Wikipedia instead of scholarly journals- a possible sign that all this fast access to information may be moving students to be poorer thinkers than in previous years of entering freshman. The internet is an amazing resource, but that doesn’t mean students don’t need the classics that parents and older siblings were exposed to. Furthermore, some students are needing full refresher courses in the core classes such as math, reading, and even science. It is suggested that students begin brushing up on these topics during the summer before their freshmen year of college, so they enter their undergraduate studies at the level they’re supposed to. With more and more colleges turning away perfectly good students, it will be important for all those applying to be prepared- and we’re not talking about cool laptops and tons of ramen noodles! Read article: A Crash Course in College Preparedness via U.S. News & World