Students and teachers alike are always excited, yet anxious, about the start of a new academic year. Grade school students pick out colorful backpacks, middle schoolers buy the latest jeans and high school students gear up for music, sports and theater activities.

College students cram TVs, refrigerators, iPods, laundry baskets, loft kits and microwaves into rental trailers to make the trek toward independence from Mom and Dad. Classes begin. Students and faculty settle in.

Yet amid the giddiness of new adventures, there is troubling news about the number of students who require remediation in college work. In addition, a paltry number of college students graduate with a degree in a timely manner. In 1997, only 53.8 percent of students enrolling in four-year colleges had completed a degree six years later, according to www.act.org.

Higher-education institutions tend to blame K-12 institutions and the K-12 folks blame the colleges.

What is the reality? I spent part of last academic year on sabbatical and, having time to think and read about our predicament in the United States, came to some conclusions about education:

Students are choosing colleges for the wrong reasons. Parents and students need to have a series of conversations beginning in the sophomore year of high school about the student’s strengths and weaknesses and use the information as a guide to the type of college selected. Trust me, even a student who scores a perfect 36 on the ACT has areas for improvement. Some advice: never choose a school based on its football team’s success or its party status.

Some parents push their kids so hard in high school, the students are burned out by the time they get to college. I have noted brilliant students over the years become so stressed they become psychotic, anorexic or both. Many ultimately drop out, which is immensely detrimental to our society as well as the student’s future.

High school educators increasingly have to contend with social problems that are interfering with learning. For me, the benefit of teaching at the college level is that disruptive students in class are few. If students are distracting others from learning, most times a talk after class takes care of the problem. If not, the students are asked to leave. I believe the public needs to have more empathy for K-12 teachers.

Higher-education institutions need to talk to the public schools on a regular basis to discover where they can work together to produce stronger high school graduates. Colleges don’t want to spend precious dollars on remediation and parents don’t want to pay thousands of dollars only to see their child drop out or spend more than six years obtaining an undergraduate college degree. Strategic planning needs to occur throughout communities to produce a college-educated workforce.

High schools need to commit more time to developing writing and critical thinking skills. In the age of communication, I find college students write poorly. They do not express themselves clearly, succinctly and with originality. If I had a vote on a local school board, students would take writing classes all four years of high school.

If serious consideration were given to these five areas, I believe significant progress could be made toward students staying in college and graduating in a timely manner. It will, however, take extensive work on the part of teachers, parents and students at all levels of education. Finger pointing is not an effective strategy.

Jean Logan is a professor of nursing at Grand View College and has a doctorate in higher education from Iowa State University.