The American College Testing (ACT) just came out with its first-ever report on the academic preparation of Indian students for college study. It is called “The Condition of College & Career Readiness 2013. American Indian Students.” They report, “Within subjects, ACT has found that students who take the recommended core curriculum are more likely to be ready for college or career than those who do not.”

It also means they have taken four years of English and three years of social studies and science. The really well prepared student will know how to use computers, will have written term papers all the way through high school, and will have read 300 or more books in preparation for college.

The books will be in the classics, philosophy, literature, biology, chemistry, biography, autobiography, and history. Five years ago I published a book called “Reading for College” to give students and parents guidance in the area of reading. It is a very hard sell to get an Indian school library to buy this book. We have sold fewer than 100 of them. Our Indian students are leaving high school without adequate knowledge of the world to know how to survive in it, much less prosper and do well.

The ACT results are much worse than I anticipated. And I knew they would be bad. Only 3% of Indian students were well prepared for college in the field of math—the worst area. This means they have taken four or five years of math, including Algebra I, Algebra II, Geometry, and Trigonometry. For science, engineering, medicine, and math graduates, it also means they have had Calculus.