Los Angeles — The three petite, soft-spoken Latinas are all friends. They graduated from Grant High School here, are on one another’s speed dial and share a preference for electric blue. And all three are stuck in basic-skills courses at Los Angeles Valley College after bombing their college placement exams, in part because they had so little guidance about what would be tested.

“I did bad – I was tired,” says Karina Carrillo, 18. “I was surprised that I had to take so many English classes over – they won’t even count as college credit for two years.”

The experience of Carrillo and her classmates Sonia Ortega and Mariana Casillas at their two-year college reflects a graduation crisis at community colleges – one that President Barack Obama addressed at a White House summit earlier this week. “More than half of those who enter community colleges fail to either earn a two-year degree or transfer to earn a four-year degree,” Obama said.

The stakes of getting stuck in remedial classes and never earning a degree are especially high in California, which is home to the nation’s largest community college system, with 112 campuses and 2.9 million students. Nationally, between 60 and 80 percent are placed in the basic-skills classes Carrillo and her classmates can’t escape, leading many to quit in frustration.

http://hechingerreport.org/content/community-college-students-mired-in-basic-skills-classes_4397/