DRAIN THOSE RETENTION PONDS. Joanne Jacobs links to a Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch story about college completion rates. Money quote:

Fifteen percent of remedial students had bachelor’s degrees, compared with 47 percent of nonremedial students.

That's six years out. Some commenters at Ms Jacobs's site note that the six-year completion cutoff misses remedial students who might finish in seven or eight years.

The analysis in the story is telling.

"When students show up for college and need remedial courses, they’re handicapped from the start," said Darrell Glenn, director of performance reporting for the Ohio Board of Regents and head of the study.

"It’s sobering to see the differences in those success rates. We’re losing people who could be well-educated, and that’s the bigger loss."

About 38 percent of incoming freshmen at Ohio public colleges and universities take remedial courses.

The study doesn’t suggest getting rid of remedial classes, but if fewer students needed them, Ohio’s economy could improve, Glenn said. "The states with good economies have well-educated work forces."

Doesn't that start in kindergarten?

The state report found that hardly any students who needed remedial classes earned degrees in Ohio’s areas of greatest need: science, technology, engineering and math. While 9 percent of nonremedial students earned degrees in those areas, only 1 percent of remedial students did.

Glenn estimates that remedial classes in Ohio cost about $100 million a year, with about 30 percent to 50 percent of that paid by the state.

To subsidize the training of exactly what high-value workers?

Note that there's not a lot of subsidization of that kind of training in the regular-admit population either.

The study found that the average cost for remedial students to obtain a bachelor’s degree in six years is less than for nonremedial students. That’s because non-remedial students are more likely to start as full-time students, enroll at four-year institutions, earn bachelor’s degrees and enroll in more-expensive majors.

Of the 62,231 students studied, 75 percent of nonremedial students enrolled full time, compared with 60 percent of remedial students. Of those full-time students, 54 percent of remedial students and 18 percent of nonremedial students enrolled at two-year schools, which generally cost less.

Ah, so those technical majors are more expensive to provide.

I fear, however, that such quantifications of "costs" are incomplete. It's a bit difficult to identify the intellectual breakthroughs and productivity gains lost from a population with fewer engineers and mathematicians. It's slightly less difficult to quantify the efficiency losses from the common schools' failure to provide the preparation in the first place, and to attribute the community and four-year college attrition rates to that lack of preparation rather than other causes.