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What's wrong with spending more time on helping struggling students?

• dataduck 6y ago
  That it inevitably means dropping the most challenging i.e. most valuable parts of the course? Not only are resources not infinite; if you make them accessible to worse students, that necessarily means removing the parts which are inaccessible.
• michaelmrose 6y ago
  To play devils advocate its not free and by default the cost accrues to the more successful students who may not have the financial resources to pay the additional funds and may opt not to attend despite being quite qualified. In some cases you may be trading more qualified graduates for less. For some the truth may be that their lack of success may be external issues that can't be resolved by an additional investment of staff resources or just unsuitability for the program that can't be resolved other than by picking a more suitable major. There is of course in the context of US education which wastes massive amounts of money so the actual answer is to stop wasting money on sports and invest that money in students but in all cases resources remain finite and some failure rate is inevitable.
  • mnky9800n 6y ago
    In the context of the US, the lack of proper financial support coupled with the lack of a proper vocational education system means that a lot of people go to college when they will not succeed. In the case of struggling students. I think it's hard to dismiss a person because they struggle in a single course. I failed calculus 2 and now I'm about to finish a PhD doing statistics and machine learning. Should I have been "let go" so to speak upon that failure? Failures matter when they are cumulative not singular. This is why early warning systems in education fail so much. They rarely have enough information to provide a warning that is actually early.
    • michaelmrose 6y ago
      Good point