A CHEAPER STATUS SIGNAL THAN A ROLEX? Laura chats with a babysitter on the front porch of 11-D, then comes up with the Question of the Day.

The guy who sold me my computer at the Apple store is a history adjunct at a local college. He has a terminal Masters from a very mediocre local college. I can't imagine that he's prepared to teach college-level history.

More students are in college than ever before. But how many of them are getting degrees that mean something? Why aren't they ticked off that they are spending thousands on empty degrees? Why are the colleges not enforcing some rigor?

Friendly connection Chris at Signifying Nothing offers a partial answer.

I’m sure Prof. Karlson would attribute many of these problems to the “access-accommodation-remediation-retention” model being followed at the lower and middle tiers of contemporary academe, but I’m not sure the fault isn’t in ourselves and the incentive to overindulge our students. My observation, which I posted at 11D, follows:

I think to many kids, college education these days is all about getting the credential, even at good schools (several different departments I interviewed with last year had the same observation, including at some very good schools). The fact that they don’t have to work very hard, or the expectations are low, is a feature, not a bug. Coupled with the over-reliance on student evaluations in decisions on faculty retention, tenure, and promotion, the incentive structure for faculty to teach rigorous courses just isn’t there.

I’m sure there’s more to the story than the demand side of the equation—certainly there exist departments and colleges where there is no institutional commitment to maintaining a high quality of instruction, and the AARR model isn’t blameless either—but students who don’t demand good classes probably won’t get them.

There's some material in my pile of potential posts that I'd like to develop further before I expand on Chris's and Laura's observations. There has to be a better explanation for a cheap degree from a not-very-challenging college than a cheap signal. The point of a signalling equilibrium is to obtain an efficient separation by ability.