States are pushing to have high schools pay for remedial courses their graduates must take in college. They want the colleges reimbursed for costs of teaching freshmen basic reading, writing and math skills they should have learned in high school, but did not.

Massachusetts, Virginia, Florida, New Jersey, Montana and Texas have all proposed that high schools pay for remedial courses. None of the bills has passed yet.

Lawmakers argue that when a public college has to offer remediation, all the state's taxpayers wind up having to pay for instruction that local taxpayers already paid for.

• Nationally, 22 percent of the 726,000 first-time freshmen in four-year public institutions took at least one remedial course in 1995.

• For all schools -- two-year, four-year, public and private -- the figure was 29 percent.

• Broad estimates of the costs of remedial courses are hard to come by, but experts say they are escalating everywhere.

• Texas' remediation costs have ballooned from $35 million a year to $153 million in the last decade, with 40 percent of freshmen now needing the help.

Although the 23 schools in California's university system pick 97 percent of their incoming freshmen from among the top third of California high school graduates, 53 percent needed remedial math and 43 percent needed remedial English last year.

Public school officials counter that colleges, greedy for tuition money at any cost, have lowered their admissions so far that they must inevitably accept students who can't cut it at the university level.

Source: John Ritter, "Who Gets Bill for Remedial Classes?" USA Today, June 5, 1997.