ECONOMIES AND DISECONOMIES OF SCOPE. John J. Miller makes an observation on the allocation of effort in higher education.

I don't want to knock the importance of original research into obscure subjects, but I also suspect that the quality of a lot of this work is quite low—and that broadly speaking, we'd be better served if more professors performed less scholarship and did more teaching.

He subsequently posts a comment he received.

Also consider that the majority of college students are semi-literates who should not be in college anyway, or even high school, and that teaching would be much easier if we could chop down the number of students by the necessary 50-75%.

Leave aside the possibly dubious empirical content of the assertion, for the sake of discussion. Such a development would make original research easier, whether the professor is meeting two classes or five, as the professor is making fewer mental changes of gear. The skill set called assisting the unprepared (or, all too frequently, called fending off excuses) is not the same as the skill set called sharp thinking.

At Inside Higher Ed, such a development is a bug, rather than a feature, when the conversation turns to accountability.

It was acknowledged that [evaluating a university's performance by end-of-semester enrollment] could create perverse incentives of its own, by discouraging institutions from enrolling academically underprepared students who might be unlikely to succeed -- a potential risk of the entire emphasis on "completion" that is increasingly in vogue.

The alternative, however, is to continue a status quo in which the high schools fail to do their jobs.