THE CASE FOR SENIOR NON-COMS.

Texas historian Steven Mintz makes it, by asking the right question.  "[I]f colleges and universities are serious about lower-division instruction, why do they relegate the responsibility for fostering the qualities and capacities [former Harvard president Derek] Bok insists demand attention largely to instructors outside the tenure system -- to adjunct, part-time and contingent faculty, as well as lecturers, professors of the practice, visiting scholars, postdocs and graduate students?"

The answer is, "If you're serious about retention and completion, take the entry level courses seriously. Perhaps then the students also will, rather than looking at them as something to get out of the way."  That will be true whether the entry level courses are being treated as "commodities" (regular readers understand that a Harvard or Texas degree is a commodity, whether the regents and boffins like it or not) or made more fungible in order that students can transfer more easily.