WHATEVER REMAINS, NO MATTER HOW IMPROBABLE, MUST BE THE TRUTH.  The dean at Anonymous Community contemplates the triune nature of dual enrollment (in the name of the gifted, and the bored, and the holy crap!)

Community colleges are colleges. I understand the temptation to try to be everything to everyone, but at the end of the day, they serve the community best by being colleges. If the high schools need fixing, then the high schools need fixing.

For that matter, colleges or universities with other modifiers also serve the community best by being colleges. A New York article titled "The University Has No Clothes" explains how higher education has struck out.

But the data gathered in recent years on the value of college has been mixed at best, blunting the moral edge of “college for all” and turning some higher-ed advocates into skeptics like [venture capitalist James] Altucher and [Pay Pal founder Peter] Thiel.

This new criticism of higher education comes from three main sources. The first is the reality that, while all parents want their kids to complete college, little more than half of those millions who haul their laptops to campus each fall actually end up with a bachelor’s degree. The United States now has the highest college-­dropout rate in the industrialized world, and in terms of 25-to-34-year-olds with college degrees, it has fallen from first to twelfth.

The high schools need fixing.  Strike one.

The second source is the quality of the education available on campus. Nearly half of all students demonstrate “exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent” gains in the skills measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, even after two years of full-time schooling, according to a study begun in 2005 by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. (Many education reformers have focused their attention to gains from investments on the other end of the spectrum, in pre-K schooling.) In 1961, the average undergraduate spent 25 hours a week hitting the books; by 2003, economists Mindy Marks and Philip Babcock recently found, that average had plummeted to thirteen hours. In a typical semester, one third of the students Arum and Roksa followed for their recent book, Academically Adrift, did not take “any courses that required more than forty pages of reading per week” and half did not take “a single course that required more than twenty pages of writing.”

Academically Adrift, which I have finished but have yet to compile some information for a review, is incompletely persuasive. But content-free and coreless curricula recentered for unprepared, uninterested, or disengaged students in pursuit of retention, completion, and favorable course evaluations does nobody any favors.  Strike two.

But it is the data on the economics of college that is most disturbing. It’s bad enough that our colleges are under­performing, one can’t help thinking—but do they have to charge so damned much? In the past 30 years, private-­college tuition and fees have increased, in constant 2010 dollars, from $9,500 a year to more than $27,000. Public-college tuition has increased from $2,100 to $7,600. Fifteen years ago, the average student debt at graduation was around $12,700; in 2009, it was $24,000. Over the past quarter-century, the total cost of higher education has grown by 440 percent. “Like many situations too good to be true,” Louis Lataif, the dean emeritus of Boston University’s School of Management, wrote in February for Forbes, “like the dot-com boom, the Enron bubble, the housing boom or the health-care-cost explosion—the ever-­increasing cost of university education is not sustainable.”

Among the public universities, the administrators blame the legislatures for breaking the social contract by cutting funding and the legislatures blame the universities for breaking the social contract by not teaching anybody. The presence of government-guaranteed student loans has the same effect as any other third-party payment on prices (just for grins, look at any detailed statement from your clinic and ask yourself how the price of a venipuncture, or a sampling tube, is determined). The flight to perceived quality, which allows administrators to quote high sticker prices and then discount individually in a way that would make a car dealer jealous, leads to a perceived demand curve that sustains those charges.  Strike three.

And the defenders of higher education defend a tradition that is more often honored in the breach.

This analysis, of course, takes a purely utilitarian view of college—higher education, as its many defenders hasten to point out, has a significance for students that defies the cost-benefit ratio. Last year, in response to a Times article titled “Plan B: Skip College,” The New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead published a rousing defense of college’s ability to, among other things, “expose individuals to the signal accomplishments of humankind.” In an essay published in March in The New York Review of Books, critic and professor Peter Brooks dismissed the swelling discontent with college as cranky and ­narrow-minded. The university is, he wrote, “one of the best things we’ve got, and at times—as when reading these books—it almost seems to me better than what we deserve.”

Yes, students have the opportunity to grapple with those signal accomplishments -- or with the long and winding road there -- should they choose to do so, but there's that annoying problem of retention or completion or Do We Have To Learn This?  (Yes, if you wish to call yourself educated.  But it takes a curriculum committee with a backbone and an administration free of faddishness to uphold that standard.  Beer 'n circus is an easier sell.)