Welcome . . .

. . . to another installment of "Sometimes I Think I'm Losing My Mind."

This via David Frum at NRO: $29 million per year in New York spent on college educations for students who never completed high school.

Some thoughts:

In my years in higher education (albeit at an open-admissions school) I can personally vouch for the notion that there are students (more than anyone will ever know) who simply do not belong in college.

Sometimes it's a matter--horrors--of aptitude. I give myself over wholeheartedly to the dynamic destruction of the marketplace, but it is a pity that the post-war 1950-1979ish world has vanished, in which a student could graduate high school or achieve a GED, get his union card, and then raise a family, buy a car and pay a mortgage on a job he knew would be there for the next 45 years. There was no way to preserve this world (short of massive, Euro-style subsidies of manufacturing), it's never coming back, and its loss is the single force driving kids into college who don't belong there--they feel (with some justification) that they have no choice in the matter.

Sometimes it's a matter of preparation. Houston public schools are a testament to this.

Most often, though, students who don't belong in college simply do not have the discipline. I'm in touch with this myself; I went to Tailback U, Southern California (which is, to say no more, not as rigorous as Yale), and spent four years hanging out at the City Room of the Daily Trojan and taking afternoon naps, a habit that did not change until two years into my doctoral program, where I realized how behind the rest of my classmates I was. The urge to stay in bed when one wants to stay in bed can sometimes overwhelm all other impulses. The worst student I ever had was in his early twenties. He lived at home with his parents, did not work, took two classes a semester, and every weekend his Paris Hilton-lookalike girlfriend would come over to clean his room and do his laundry. (If I sound jealous, I was--only of the last part, though.) His modus operandi was to enroll in my class, do nothing, then quit midway through the semester. (One memorable morning, he arrived late for my midterm, picked the test off my desk, glanced at the first page, shook his head, tossed the test back in the pile, and walked out the door, not to be seen until the following spring.) He finally passed when his father threatened to throw him out--a common practice among parents of students of mine. Where he ended up I don't know--but, as he conducted himself, he didn't belong in college.

Having stated all the above, I now wonder: what does it take not to graduate from high school? Doing nothing is usually good for a D-minus. Are New Yorkers paying $29 million to subsidize dropouts?