Here's another thought stimulated by the "4 year persistence" data.
In many cases, the schools with the lowest persistence numbers are
/state/ schools.
When looking at these numbers, we should keep in mind that in many
states, there is a policy that /requires/ the state university to
accept any applicant in the top 50% or so of the high-school graduating
class.
The catch is, they have to admit 'em, but they don't have to give 'em
passing grades.
To put it bluntly, there are some students who just aren't ready for
college. At a private school, many of them would be weeded out by the
admissions process. At these state schools, the weeding-out is done
later.
This is surely beneficial for /some/ students. If the student can handle
the coursework, then he belongs in the course ... proof by construction.
The admissions process is at best an /approximate/ prediction of who will
be able to handle the coursework. Bypassing the admission decision will
bypass /some/ mistaken rejections. On the other hand, this benefit for
/some/ students comes at a hig cost to other students, who get admitted
to the deep water without knowing how to swim. As the Subject: line says,
failure is always an option.
At such schools, student performance is often bimodal: There are some
students who were admitted on merit, and really want to be there, and
really want to do well ... while other students were admitted by rule,
and aren't sure they want to be there.
This directly flies in the face of "no student left behind". The policy
is effectively "half the students left behind".
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It would be nice to have a discussion of good ways to /motivate/ students.
This thread is tangentially related to that, in the sense that some
schools use the threat of flunking out as one form of motivation. On
the other hand, contrary to popular belief, the most highly selective
schools, including the rigorous drinking-from-the-firehose schools,
evidently do not rely on this to any great extent.
So the real questions concern motivation:
-- How do you motivate students in the national top 5%? That's trivial,
because they're already self-motivated to a fault. There's not much we
can learn from this.
-- How do you motivate the generic moderately-good students? That's
what we need to understand. Some teachers do this much better than
others, and we should be able to learn from that. Sometimes an entire
/school/ does this much better than others, and we should be able to
learn from that, too.
-- How do you motivate half of the students when you're hardly even
trying to motivate the other half? I don't know. That sounds hard.