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“[C]olleges receive government money based largely on how many students they enroll. Perversely, colleges can even help their budgets by having a lot of dropouts.”

In the New York Times, David Leonhardt points out that

most dropouts today are not students unable to keep up with college work. Instead, they generally attend colleges that, research shows, are neither very rigorous nor very engaged in students’ lives. Many of these colleges devote little energy to thinking about — let alone improving — their graduation rate. Changing the funding rules could help change that mind-set.

He calls for cutbacks on badly targeted, inequitable college loan programs.

Margaret Soltan, January 25, 2011 10:08PM
Posted in: the university

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One Response to ““[C]olleges receive government money based largely on how many students they enroll. Perversely, colleges can even help their budgets by having a lot of dropouts.””

  1. david foster Says:

    Kind of like the Soviet-era bathtub factory that measured the manager on total tonnage of bathtubs produced. Remarkably enough, they didn’t bother to install the valves and faucets…

    Or the recent case in the UK where hospitals were measured on time from patient check-in at the ER to the time they first saw a doctor. This one was gamed by simply leaving the patients in the ambulance for longer.

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