Fordham Institute former president Chester Finn is concerned about the “cheapening” of the meaning of “college educated.”

Here is some of Finn’s April 25, 2015, lament:

A vast amount of contemporary education policy attention and education reform energy has been lavished on the task of defining and gauging “college readiness” and then taking steps to align K–12 outcomes more closely with it. …

The entire Common Core edifice—and the assessments, cut scores, and accountability arrangements built atop it—presupposes that “college-ready” has the same definition that it has long enjoyed…

The idea of graduating more “college-ready” kids from high school is intended to lighten the remediation burden…

But what if “college-ready” no longer means that you actually have to be prepared to succeed in credit-bearing college courses? Or if “credit-bearing courses” are diluted such that more people appear “prepared” to succeed in them, even though such success means less than it…