NJ DUDS

NJ STARS represents one of Jim McGreevey’s signal accomplishments. Unsurprisingly, due to poor design, it failed miserably. But, inadvertently, it provides unequivocal proof of the appalling failure of New Jersey’s primary and secondary education.

As designed, the program intended to make a New Jersey college education affordable to the State’s best and brightest students. Initially, it provided that any student in the top 20% of his/her high school class might, under defined circumstances, attend a local community college tuition-free. Subsequently, it expanded to entitle a student who successfully completed his/her stint at a community college to continue on to a four year degree, again at taxpayer expense.

At first, many of us in the Legislature wondered just how many top-flight students would foreswear an offer from Johns Hopkins to matriculate at County College of Morris for two years. The answer, quite obviously, is: none. We assumed that the best and brightest – those in the top 20% – would enjoy multiple offers elsewhere and would forego the modest subsidy offered to matriculate in a community college, rendering this program not much more than a campaign gimmick.

Predictably, the program got off to a modest start, enrolling only a few hundred kids. But instead of providing opportunity for the State’s best students, it demonstrated just how woefully unprepared for college our "best" students tend to be.

One would imagine that, in New Jersey, which spends more money on educating its children than ... well, one is tempted to say the rest of the world combined, the results would be exemplary, with students – and, certainly, the "best" students – emerging from high school possessing all the skills necessary to excel in college. Au contraire. NJ STARS demonstrates the astonishingly pitiful results produced by our hugely expensive educational establishment.

Although the STARS program applies only to the top 20% of students, fully 1/3 of all STARS participants require remedial courses. Only 1/5 of the participants graduated from their local community colleges in 2 years; only two-fifths in the allotted five semesters.

And these students are the BEST that New Jersey has to offer? Something is very wrong with this picture.

Obviously, New Jersey needs to do a great deal of thinking about its educational system. If our best students, despite astonishing public expenditures, require remedial work to survive at a community college, and only 40% struggle through at all, our high schools simply ain’t doing the job we pay them to do. The educational establishment’s boasts about graduation rates rings very hollow when we consider how poorly their exemplary students perform at colleges which – to be fair – are not exactly among the most competitive. Students requiring remedial work should not be graduating from high school at all, let alone in the top 20%. Of ANY school.

Our secondary schools owe those students intent on continuing on to college a thorough and efficient preparation in the materials that college work requires. Quite clearly, they are failing miserably, at great expense.

On the merits of the program, NJ STARS also suffers from a fundamental flaw: it’s a gift. To an adult. Handing an adult a gift at taxpayer expense is always problematic. This program presently costs about $15 million per annum; like all governmental programs, the costs are projected to increase substantially. NJ STARS, clearly, fails to effect its salutary goal of providing opportunity for our best and brightest students, while still serving the taxpayer; it requires basic reform.

According benefits to the top 20% of students in every school, without regard to the competitiveness, puts those students in exemplary districts at a massive disadvantage. A child at school A, finishing in the 40th percentile might be eminently more qualified for college than one finishing in the top 5% at school B in a less competitive district. As the stated goal of this program is to assist the best NJ students, superior students should not be disqualified because they live in superior districts.

Second, the taxpayers should expect a more direct return on investment. Nothing prevents a student, benefitting from a massive taxpayer subsidy, from simply moving to PA the day after gradation. Having been handed a benefit worth tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, it behooves the recipients to offer something concrete in return.

NJ should look to replace NJ STARS with something akin to Teach for America. Taking grades (including consideration of the level of course work) and test scores, not merely class rank, into account, an interested student could apply for the scholars program. A number of these NJ Scholars – say 5,000, for the purposes of this discussion – would be chosen annually. Their education at any NJ college should be "free", provided that they maintain their grades in an accepted course of study.

But, when they graduate, they owe the taxpayers four years of teaching, at a school within (say) 30 miles of their homes, receiving whatever pay a teacher generally receives in those districts. Any student who either fails to make grades or fails to fulfill his contractual requirements would be expected to repay the full cost of the benefit the taxpayers bestowed.

Fulfilling the intent of NJ STARS, such a program would ensure that New Jersey’s best students, who might otherwise be unable to afford a college education, would receive one. It would also ensure that the taxpayers get a full return on their investment. All parties would benefit: the taxpayers, the scholars, and their slightly younger siblings, who will now enjoy the benefit of instruction by a cadre of bright, young, accomplished teachers.

But while reforming this program to achieve the goals its authors intended, we should not lose sight of the glaring defect in our educational system the present program exposed. Self-evidently, many NJ high schools are committing educational malpractice and require fundamental reform.