No-- it seems to me (and, apparently to the others who have posted) that a return to higher standards in both higher ed admissions (and instruction) and also in K-12 is really the only way to make education both appropriate and less costly to individuals without making it unconstitutional.

To do that, however, we need to stop pretending that innate intelligence isn't a factor in academic success, and we also need to stop pretending that academics is all that matters in workplace readiness, or adult life, for that matter.

A return to Vo-Tech for those individuals who are neither college oriented nor college material seems to be unlikely, but it is certainly part of the solution. Currently, we're (as a society) unwilling to admit that no, not everyone can be a rocket scientist... and particularly unwilling to unflinchingly say it to earnest young people. Not everything IS possible for a particular individual. I see this as a huge problem in the system, and one that makes free college education a non-starter in this country unless/until we fix it. We have to be willing to set standards and exclude those that cannot/will not meet them-- not adjust our standards to include everyone. This neglects the reason why the standards exist to start with. We treat education as though it is somehow different than, say, issuing driver's licenses. If you don't pass the vision test, you don't get a license. Sorry, but that's that; there are no adjustments to the vision test in order to make sure that everyone can pass it. The road test, similarly-- if you don't pass, you don't pass. I'm not sure why we see 'education' as something so meaningless that we're willing to apply the label "college education" to pretty much whatever a student wants or is able to do. Doesn't that make the entire enterprise more or less a giant diploma mill? frown This has consequences-- just as it would if driver's licensing were treated that way.

Funny thing about hypotheses, by the way-- correctly constructed and tested, the answers can be "no, that's not right" as well, but that doesn't mean that the investigation yields nothing useful in a larger sense. Just saying.



Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.