That's not the issue. College algebra courses are super compressed, they're basically trying to teach the whole of junior high + high school math in a single semester. That's barely teaching, and the natural outcome of such a cursorily taught course is to act as a 'weedout' course.
Yup. My observation (having not had to take College Algebra myself, but knowing people who did) is that it's a class to make sure people who fell off the math train back at operations on fractions or factoring or whatever, don't get any farther.
I was a tutor in business school on behalf of the MBA program. Basically, there was a small group of students who were... not prepared with respect to math. We're talking really simple algebra, maybe the simplest of differentiation (e.g. maxima of a simple quadratic function).
One of them told me one day "I don't understand graphs." I tried but it's impossible at that point to make up for an apparent total lack of at least high school level arithmetic/math.
I mean, what do you want them to do? Invest resources in splitting up material into multiple courses when they should have learned it before even coming to college? It's not their fault public schools suck.
State universities kind of do have this responsibility. My school is doing more or less this, restructuring some of the math sequences that have a high failure rate, like precalc/calc 1.
Also state universities are where most of the public school teachers and administrators trained, so they probably deserve a little of the blame for the state of public schools.
IMO the only stuff a student "should have learned" is stuff that they can't get onto the course without knowing. Allowing someone onto the course, for which "x" is a prerequisite, who doesn't know "x" is entirely the university's responsibility.
All public schools do not suck but especially urban schools can have a lot of problems and many of the students don't have a great home environment either,
