The practice of open admissions, coupled with remedial courses to shore up the academic skills of the poorly prepared, lets secondary schools off the hook and undercuts the learning environment in four-year colleges.

Many feel that open admissions just recognizes reality. If secondary schools aren't doing the job, then colleges must take up the slack. But letting our academic standards slide causes everyone to suffer.

Remedial bureaucracies, for instance, grow larger and larger, often at the expense of traditional academic offerings.

This growth generates demand for more students to justify the growth. I've been teaching at the University of Southern Maine for 31 years, and I can tell you that we're admitting more students in need of remediation than ever before.

Faculty feel pressure to lower standards to accomodate the ever-growing number of remedial students, and it's not just because they believe in equal opportunity. Classroom management problems and student evaluation of faculty issues also come into play.

The result of all this: Many college students graduate with deficiencies. Employers find these graduates lack basic skills and must set up remedial courses of their own.

If NEA believes quality in education is our responsibility, we should help put academic muscle back in the secondary schools and support remeditation in the community colleges.

About three-quarters of higher education institutions that enrolled freshmen in 1995 offered at least one remedial reading, writing, or math course.

Remedial courses were especially common at institutions with high minority enrollments, where 94 percent of the students took such courses.

The up-side of this situation: 95 percent of students taking remedial courses do so for a year or less.

Remedial education helps students succeed in college, and this sucess adds value to society as a whole. Education, after all, is more than a private perk: An educated citizenry is essential to a stable democracy, a growing economy, and a reasonable standard of living. Preparing students for higher education is one of the keys to attaining that goal.

Remedial education in a four-year setting creates real synergy. A student can simultaneously learn remedial skills in one course and apply them in another, and mainstream course work is often the basis of remedial assignments.

A remedial writing instructor, for instance, uses the student's mainstream assignment to improve the student's writing abilities.

But let's recognize that it's not enough to remediate students. We must also reform our entire educational system. Only when this is accomplished will we need to provide fewer remedial courses in our colleges and universities.

* William Steele, associate professor at the University of Southern Maine, is co-president of his Associated Faculties chapter.

*Joe Laiacona is a part-time instructor in writing at Columbia College, an open-admissions, private college in Chicago.