I perceive a slight analogy with U.S. auto companies that focused way too much on *revenue* when they should have been thinking more about *profit*...not a lot of point in thumping your chest about selling & making zillions of cars if you have less money every month than you had the month before.

Similarly, not much point in endlessly increasing the number of people going to college if every year the knowledge level of the graduates declines.

Part of the problem is, the egos of people running organizations..and their personal compensation..tends to link closely with the size of the organization, so there is an incentive to focus on growth to a degree that is not always consistent with the organization's true purpose.

"The working assumption these days seems to be that we have to dumb down the curriculum in order to retain students."

The people making that assumption are, in fact, correct. A prime reason for the watering down of curricula is that a great many students on our college campuses should never have been accepted in the first place. They are not suited for such study. They are not stupid; they just don't have the skills or desire to do the work Auer Jones is talking about. But the schools need those tuition dollars, don't they?

It seems to me the problem is a combination of well-intentioned policy ("if they get a degree, they'll make more money!"), and cold calculation ("if they get a compromised degree, we'll make more money!").

The failure of K-12 education, of course, plays a huge role here, as has often been pointed out on this site, but isn't it cynical to welcome so many unprepared students to higher ed. knowing that quite often they will fail out, never return, and incur, in some cases, a large debt?

I think we need better, and less expensive vocational education options (although there are some reasonably priced community college programs). Voc Ed got a bad name years ago, because it was so often used to herd "problem" students and minorities into blue collar fields (and bad schools) and exclude them from college. It's time to rethink Voc Ed. It can give a person -- and I know several who went through it -- a career, a good income, and some measure of happiness.

Tom -- I agree completely. Fewer folks should be going to college, and K-12 should be far more accountable for preparing those folks who do wish to go to college for what they will find there. That said, once they get there, the standards should be high, and the course content challenging. Right now undergrad education seems to fall between two stools: what many, many students need is major remediation, but colleges don't want to face that for what it is -- and so they play a game wherein they describe students as more able than they are and adjust the curriculum accordingly.

FWIW, the same is true of grad education, at least in the humanities. There is a fiction, for example, that if you are a grad student in English, you must be able to write (not necessarily true) and you must know your basic canon / literary history (also not true). That fiction licenses grad programs not only to neglect teaching writing per se (even though they need to), but to dump grad students of uncertain writing ability into the freshman comp classroom to teach writing (which doesn't serve freshmen well, but does allow the faculty to evade the onerous task of teaching composition). The fiction also enables these programs to avoid the question of whether students are specializing before they have core foundation in the discipline. You can get a PhD without having ever read a Shakespeare play--and there are people who do.

I do think it's important to think about Erin's question: "What if actually engaging and challenging students--treating them like intelligent beings capable of rising to the intellectual occasion, and expecting that they will--what if that proved to be a key component of retention?"

There is certainly a category of people who are too dumb, uninterested, or just plain lazy to succeed in college--but there is another category of those who, given leadership, inspiration, and high standards, would live up to those standards.

Antoine de St-Exupery: "A civilization, like a religion, accuses itself when it complains of the tepid faith of its members"

But what if the opposite were true? What if actually engaging and challenging students--treating them like intelligent beings capable of rising to the intellectual occasion, and expecting that they will--what if that proved to be a key component of retention?

This strikes me as a classic example of the prisoners' dilemma. If academia as a whole started challenging and engaging students, retention might well rise and outcomes might improve. The problem is that few middle-tier institutions feel that they can go it on their own without risking losing students to more "flexible" competitors. The same is true of instructors: it's difficult (though not impossible) to be demanding and rigorous when your colleagues have succumbed to grade inflation and are catering to a culture of curricular consumerism.

PeterS..."prisoners dilemma"..an interesting line of thought. As a partial counter, I'd observe that elite military organizations--Rangers, Special Forces, etc--rarely lack for recruits, even though it's well known that the training will be more difficult than the more mainline organizations.

David: I'm sure that your comments about elite military institutions are valid for at least some elite academic institutions as well (MIT, maybe). The tough part is implementing higher standards in the middle-of-the-pack institutions that most students attend. An individual institution might possibly be able to rebrand itself as more rigorous than its peers, but it's a risky proposition in a world in which education is increasingly perceived as a commodity.

Part of the problem is that the preception of a university's quality probably lags the reality by quite a few years. Thus, if you're in the first batch of students who attend Podunk Tech, during its intensive upgrade effort to become the next MIT, then you will work a lot harder than you would have otherwise...but the increased value of a Podunk Tech degree won't be realized for another 5-10 years, if then.

Kind of like playing on a sports team in which the scores would somehow be kept secret and only published many years later...and then published in some kind of averaged form ensuring that players would never be able to associate their particular era with wins or losses.

The College of New Jersey managed to re-invent itself as a highly respected public liberal arts college. Worth looking at as an example of how these kinds of things can be done. But there is the question of how many campuses can afford to undergo this kind of transformation. Presumably the kind of great students that go to TCNJ (or Harvard or MIT) are in high demand because of scarcity.

What happens when teachers are either discouraged from upholding high academic standards or encouraged to massage grades by administrators who are terrified by the prospect of losing tuition dollars?

The program I was in had a 1.98 departmental average grade given out.

But, students knew they were actually learning something.

I was in Econ, but they discussed how our accounting graduates could get jobs with 2.5 gpas where a competing program could not place its students with 3.5s. If someone had a 2.5 they had actually learned something from our program.

By making it harder, they increased the value to the students which increased their desire and willingness to hold on and graduate.