WHO RUNS THE CURRICULUM? Some time ago (where has October gone?), I linked to a Chris Lawrence invitation to fisk a rather foolish column by Eugene Hickock, which I learned about at University Diaries, herself less than impressed with one observation in the column:

Out of touch with much of America? What could be more American than comic books? The academy's problem is that it's way too much in touch with America.

At the time, I hinted at a longer commentary based on the column and a few other readings. Let's start with the missing money paragraphs:

While they’re at it, colleges and universities must make it a priority that their students graduate. While most tuition payers assume a baccalaureate degree takes four years to complete, the truth is it takes typically more than six years. In 2003, only 34 percent of graduating students had completed their degree in four years or less.

There are reasons for this, some of them understandable. But in far too many institutions, the emphasis is on enrolling students, not on graduating them. And far too often, that includes enrolling students who are not adequately prepared for higher education, and who therefore drop out after one or two semesters of struggling, or else spend most of their time in remedial or developmental courses that are not really college-level. Behind the impressive numbers of low-income and minority students enrolled in higher education are grim statistics regarding completion for a degree.

Put simply: the access-assessment-remediation-retention model (2A-2R, for business types) is not working.

Columbia's Andrew Delbanco writes a column for Inside Higher Ed that suggests faculty get more involved in admissions:

With the exception of a few modest teaching prizes and recognition ceremonies, nothing beyond a sense of duty encourages faculty, especially in research universities, to pay much attention to undergraduates before or after they are admitted. And when they do pay attention, they tend to grumble about too many athletes, or students who don’t write well, or who lack proficiency in science — and to blame the admissions office.

But what role do faculty play in developing the policies on which the admissions office acts? At most, a minor one — which is particularly disturbing when it comes to tenured faculty, whose job security should encourage frank participation in university governance without fear of demotion or reprisal. Yes, the scale of the admissions process has become daunting. In some cases, tens of thousands of applications must be evaluated, so it would be hardly more than symbolic for faculty to read — as we once did at Columbia — a few distinctive folders. And yes, some administrators regard faculty as potential meddlers and prefer using catch-words such as “diversity” and “excellence” to asking hard questions about what these terms actually mean.

But, if admissions policy has been reduced to slogans, blaming the administrators is finally an evasion of faculty responsibility. Most faculty are simply not interested and therefore uninformed. Any discussion of, say, the distinction between need-based aid and merit aid, or about principle versus practice in “need-blind” admissions, or the correlation between SAT scores and family income, or about the case for or against increasing the numbers of international students, is likely to elicit a perplexed stare even from those who hold confident opinions about many other matters outside their field of expertise.

You mean even court intellectuals at the Ivies have some modesty left? Quel surprise!

Heckling aside, getting the standards right matters. There are market tests, and those market tests have a stricter grading curve than the 2A-2R folks are prepared to meet. Arnold Kling has inquiries at Econ Log into the nature and causes of what appears to be a falling premium to the baccalaureate.

My guess is that a lot of people who attend college today are not really ready for college. They get some remediation in college, but they also get "junk degrees" in subjects where standards are low.

If my hypothesis is correct, then folks who majored in real subjects, like engineering or philosophy or even economics, are holding up ok. That is, a philosophy major today is in the same spot in the income distribution as her counterpart 25 years ago.

However, the "average" college graduate is in a lower spot in the income distribution than her counterpart of 25 years ago, because the "average" now includes more people who majored in [a program] that does not require much in the way of critical thinking.

The first paragraph suggests the 2A-2R model will not pass the market test. More to the point, it suggests that the common schools ought to be doing their job, rather than having the university's student affairs staff, let alone the regular faculty, making an attempt at replicating high school. The second paragraph is a testable hypothesis. Do we know that the return on traditional degrees is comparable over a longer time span, perhaps adjusted for secular and cyclical fluctuations. The third paragraph suggests that Departments of Cooling Out the Mark, while perhaps nice to have around, are inefficient uses of resources.

What will it take for individual faculty members and faculty curriculum committees to say "Enough" to the pushers of 2A-2R?