TRADEOFFS. Rather than run a Second Section to Monday's mini-dissertation, I'll quote this (register using your Chicago Tribune codes), which Joanne Jacobs found. "Overall, the document finds, the admissions process at UC Berkeley 'might not be compatible with [the school's] goal of maintaining academic excellence.'" There's more to this sort of remediation than the tradeoff between access and standards, something which might lead universities to build waterparks as a cheaper alternative to building academic departments. Consider a mathematician, working on convergence of approximation algorithms in large-dimensional spaces. (That problem interests me. I don't know whether it interests mathematicians. If it's a bad guess, forgive me, but stay with me.) Suppose that mathematician's published and in progress research looks good to a serious mathematics department, such as Berkeley's. Now tell that mathematician that his duties include teaching entering students the algebra that they paid no attention to, or their middle-school teacher failed to teach them. Is that a career-enhancing development? The generalization of this problem to other disciplines and to other universities is left to the reader as an exercise.