COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGES. One of the inefficiencies of the push to get more people into university stems from the mixing of prepared and unprepared students.

For example, 25 percent of all tuition increases [in the North Carolina system] will be dedicated to expanding special programs to increase retention and graduation rates, primarily for students with weak academic backgrounds.

The focus on such special programs gives out mixed signals about how to deal with the problem of low graduation rates. For, at the same time plans are being formulated to expand these programs for students who are unprepared to begin college, university officials are also considering addressing the same problem by an opposing tactic—limiting enrollment and thus allowing only relatively prepared students to enter.

On the other hand, offering a premium service (no special education students to drag everybody down) is an opportunity to charge premium prices. But I digress. Perhaps, as the column suggests, there are more cost-effective ways to identify those late bloomers.

The second approach [the first being even more special ed] to improving graduation rates encourages academically weaker students to start at the community college level rather than at the four-year universities. This measure is particularly important now, because of the economic downturn. The cost of educating a student at a university is usually between two or three times the cost at a community college. With six-year graduation rates for students who start their college careers at the universities hovering below 60 percent, many students drop out without markedly improving their skill level. This is not only a drag on the state’s economy, but there is little benefit to the dropouts as well.

Under this proposal, the social waste (which actually begins in K-12, but I can only tilt at a few windmills today) is still present, but it's less costly. There might be some gains from specialization and division of labor. The columnist correctly recognizes that professors who have research degrees and obligations to publish original research might not be the best high school teachers.

Another problem is that CHEER requires that highly-paid, university-system tenure-track Ph.D. professors teach at the high school remedial level, when community college teachers with lesser degrees are perhaps more suited for the task—and far less costly to taxpayers.

Perhaps some sort of scaled-down “boot camp” approach would make more sense if implemented at the appropriate level—the community colleges. The universities are not the place to re-teach high school subjects and to teach basic social skills. They exist to impart higher knowledge to serious students, and to create new knowledge through research.

What is it about remediation and acronyms? CHEER is "Creating Higher Expectations for Educational Readiness". Northern Illinois has CHANCE, which at one time was formed from "Complete Help & Assistance Necessary to Complete Education" or something to that effect, and some functionaries here insist on turning the adjective "smart" (describing a classroom with a document camera, computer with internet access, and a whiteboard) into all caps, although I've never seen that version expanded into a slogan.

The National Association of Scholars diagnoses program and adminstrator proliferation.

In our view public higher education across the country does face some deep financial problems. Those problems are rooted in vast overexpansion of colleges and universities in the last several decades. We in fact agree with at least one part of the AAUP’s diagnosis: “institutions have increased their relative investment in administrative positions and expenditures, and decreased their relative investment in educational positions and expenditures.” There has been a bewildering expansion of supernumerary administrative positions, including diversity officers, identity group deans, directors and staff of women’s centers, sustainability officers, residence life curriculum developers, outcomes assessors, and campus therapists of every conceivable brand. It is not clear that the AAUP realizes that it has wandered into the territory of agreeing with the NAS. But if the AAUP is serious about the problem of administrative bloat, it will need to take on all those fashionable PC annexes to the basic educational mission of the university.

We may also have some common ground with the AAUP in its worry about “a restructuring of the academic workforce from a largely full-time tenure-track faculty to one that is overwhelmingly contingent on managerial discretion and whim.” Some of what is indispensable to a genuine liberal arts education depends on having a faculty that is full-time and fully dedicated to the students in its charge. The danger, however, doesn’t come from “managerial discretion and whim.” It comes from scaling up university enrollments past the point in which it is financially feasible to sustain the curriculum on the basis of a mostly full-time tenured faculty.

Indeed. If your preference is to work with those underserved populations, or to teach high school to twentysomethings, there might be opportunities even in this economy.

A terrible confession: although the majority of the math sections taught at most cc's fall into the developmental or intermediate categories, full-time faculty frequently aren't hired with an eye to that. Generally -- with noble exceptions -- you'll find higher concentrations of adjuncts at the lower end of the curriculum, even though that's where the students need the most (and best) instruction. Depending on where you are, it may be typical to require a master's degree in math to teach any level of math at all.

For the record, I consider this insane.

A master's degree is not necessarily the right credential. A Ph.D., which is a research degree, is a serious misallocation of resources.

The short answer is that a PhD may help, but so could a lot of other things. And if a community college gig is what you really want, the reward for time and effort getting a PhD is likely to be a bad bargain. (I won't address universities, since they inhabit a different niche.)

The details:

I'd like to say that cc students are more motivated, but the truth is more complicated. They range from highly motivated to clearly not, with all levels in between. We all enjoy working with highly motivated students; the real craft comes in working with those who aren't quite sure what's going on. The best professors I've seen at the cc level have managed to show respect for students even while challenging them, somehow convincing them that they're more capable than they think they are. That's no small feat, and the people who can do that day in and day out are rare and valuable.

Given the mission of the community college, it wouldn't make sense to get the second- or third-best research faculty. We want the best teachers. Frequently, those teachers also have fairly active research agendas, even if the forms that research takes wouldn't count for tenure at an R1. That's fine with me. If you can show that you love teaching, you keep current in your field, and you can relate to all kinds of people, you'll leapfrog untold numbers of Ph.D.'s.

Keep in mind, however, that a Ph.D. class at Harvard has, by definition, middling and weaker students as well as stars. Getting the second- or third-best researchers into a research department poses challenges of its own. But asking research-minded faculty to take up special education is probably the worse mistake.