I’m Duly Impressed…
By The Provost at UK has launched a “War on Attrition”, designed to mobilize faculty around the goal of keeping economically marginal students in school during the recession. In spite of my general skepticism of Wars on X, I think that the goal is a worthy one; a certain attrition rate for public universities is healthy and necessary, but the reasons for that attrition should be related to academics and maturity rather than to economics. Moreover, a recession is precisely when economically marginal students should be in college, because the alternatives aren’t so good. Matt had a good post on the challenges facing college graduates during poor economic times, and I’d assume that the situation is even more dire for non-graduates. And there are, of course, lots of things that faculty can do to help out economically disadvantaged students, such as maintaining non-traditional office hours, being open to alternative assignments, and trying to keep textbook prices down.
Most of all, though, I’m impressed that we’re now naming our campaigns after semi-obscure episodes in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Looking forward to our Suez Crisis…