Conclusion: the adjunct model is suitable for colleges that cater to average students and less-qualified students.
TBH, I'm not sure what "less-qualified" means.
Sure, it's easy to make an assumption that students with sky-high GPAs and lots of extracurricular activities are "more qualified," but I'm not so sure that's true. Personally, I don't think that industrial metrics apply well in this situation. Granted, it's more likely that someone with a C- average and SAT scores <500 won't be prepared, but given that one wrong question can knock an SAT score down by 20 or 30 points, and given that you can only get something like 4 wrong on the math section to get a 700, it isn't clear to me that we can honestly discriminate between high scores (say, 650+). The same can be said for grades, given how inflated they are. So even if you trust the industrial metrics, their distribution seems to have been squished, making it difficult to tease out much meaningful information from the top chunk.
Then there is the helicoptering and and the hyper-prepping. By "prepping," I mean forced extracurriculars and forced, well, everything. Prepping may get students lots of iridescent
Great job! stickers, but if it's thrust upon them, much of it means nothing. IMO, if the desire isn't coming from WITHIN the student, the student is at high risk of falling apart when he decides he's had enough.
Certainly, I've been hearing and reading a lot of complaints from professors about the A+++ students with garlands and iridescent stickers on their diplomas. Specifically, they're characterized as being LESS prepared than students of previous years who had lower (but still solidly high) GPAs --- but perhaps more internal motivation.
