SELF-SELECTION. Thomas Sowell points out the error of access-assessment-remediation-retention.

There are, of course, many students and professors who are in the academic world for the very serious purpose of acquiring knowledge and deepening one’s understanding of the world and oneself.

Most of my own academic career was spent in places like Cornell and UCLA, where there were scholars with distinguished reputations in their respective fields and where the student body was significantly above the national average.

Even so, there were still quite a few students, especially at UCLA, whose interest in the life of the mind was, to put it charitably, limited.

More important, the negative effect of students who are not serious can be detrimental to the education of those who are. I found this to be true in each of the five colleges and universities where I taught, as well as in each of the three universities from which I received degrees.

George Leef revises and extends.

The students who interested in academic work after high school are already going to college. Most of those who now don’t go to college aren’t well prepared for it and want to do other things. Consequently, [Richard] Vedder concludes, “If incremental state funding encourages relatively unqualified students to pursue college, the marginal attrition rate amongst those students is likely to be extremely high.” (Here, Vedder could have strengthened his argument with evidence that substantial numbers of college graduates now wind up doing jobs that don’t really require any advanced education.)

I'd add, extending some earlier posts, "the tenure-track faculty will only rarely see the rotten fruit of that harvest."

Professor Sowell raises a second point that ought to give pause to the advocates of mindless productivity measurement.

The sizes of the classes and the campuses can also have an impact. Too many people do not think through the consequences of admitting a larger number of students, including some who may not be as well qualified as the others.

When I taught an honors class in introductory economics at Cornell — a seminar with 15 students, compared to a couple of hundred students in the regular class — my department chairman urged me to expand the honors class to 30 students, “so that more students can get the advantage of the small class.”

It never seemed to occur to him that expanding the class would destroy the advantages of the small seminar.

The chairman will get a bonus for increasing the student-credit-hours-per-faculty-member.

Professor Sowell also points to a possible improvement in total factor productivity.

At both Douglass College and Howard University, where I taught the full year course in introductory economics, the second semester classes were a sheer delight because the less serious students dropped out after their experience with my grading standards in the first semester.

It was not just that the remaining students were better than the ones who left, they were better than they themselves had been in a class atmosphere that was different when influenced by less serious students.

At Amherst College, one of the classes that I taught as a visiting professor was made compulsory for graduating seniors, against my wishes, and just a couple of students with bad attitudes managed to dampen some of the other students, who were outstanding in themselves.

Retention, when it matters: up. Working conditions and faculty morale: improved. Potential for a compensating differential for faculty: there.

He, however, would not make a good famer, and perhaps he lacks the teaching vocation.

A graduate seminar that I taught at UCLA was a great experience the first year I taught it, largely because of one outstanding student who raised the level of discussion for the others. But, when I taught it the next year without that student, the results were so meager that I never taught that seminar again.

At the end of one class session I told the members of the seminar: “I have a decision to make and you gentlemen have helped me to make it.”

With that, I went on leave for two years to run a research project in Washington.

Professoring is a lot like farming, in that you're not always sure ex ante what the learning environment will be, and sometimes the sun shines and sometimes the grasshoppers flock, but you don't quit the first time you have a below-average year.