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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

As a general rule, "qualified" students are much more likely to exhibit the behaviors this program implements:

house them together, encourage them to form study groups, provide them with mentors and tutors, meet with them regularly to stress the importance of academic achievement, monitor their progress closely, involve them in research, take away their scholarships if they fail to make a "B" average, they will perform better than students deprived of these benefits.

And before anyone gets hung up on the "scholarship" part: I know plenty of students who had parents pay for at least some of their college, but knew they had to perform or their parents would stop paying. That expectation of performance is the same.

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> As a general rule, "qualified" students are much more likely to exhibit the behaviors this program implements

Well, yes.

So the idea here is to take a bunch of underperforming students and invest money and effort into them in the hopes of raising their performance.

Suppose we invested similar amounts in students who were already not failing. We might see an increase in their performance too. Would that be valuable? More or less so than this?

It might be the case that the techniques, etc. being taught to failing students were already known to the not-failing ones, so in that case, there would be diminishing returns to having the students who were already doing better do the same things. It is an interesting question though: should we be more concerned with having everyone reach some uniform level of performance, or is it worth investing more resources in the “best and brightest” students, even though they’re already ahead of everyone else? I think it’s important for public schools at the K–12 level to provide resources for above-average students, which shouldn’t be that difficult except for political questions like how to motivate schools to focus on this, and how to justify spending resources on students who are already going to pass the standardized tests.

Again, I'm not suggesting we teach normal students to do things they already do. That would be stupid. I'm saying, what if we invested similar amounts of higher-level support? You can hold people's hands at all levels of achievement.

What kind of things do you have in mind?

Once you know how to study and want to learn, there's a whole internet full of knowledge. Before, things like access to a fancy library, or labs would definitely boost productivity for a successful student. At least for the more theoretical subjects, we have far more resources available to learn from than 100 years ago.

Well, the main goal was to increase graduation rates, so in that context, probably not (the advantaged students already had 90% graduation rates).

What definition of valuable were you thinking of?

Let's say society prospers when there's more stuff and withers when there's less stuff. The traditional way to measure the amount of "stuff" is by looking at GDP (on a societal level) or GDP per capita (on an individual level). None of this has any obvious effect on the population of the country, so they're the same thing.

I'll also make the assumption that your lifetime earnings are a multiple of your entry-level salary, just to have an anchor for the numbers. Equivalently, assume that whenever you get a raise, it's defined as a percentage of your current salary.

With that assumption and the GDP definition of value-to-society, we can immediately see that it's 50% better to, by intervention, raise someone's starting salary from $50K to $80K than to raise a different person's starting salary from $10K to $30K. But it might be cheaper and easier to produce a 60% improvement in the $50K guy than a 200% improvement in the $10K guy.

Pretty much everything in college is geared to those students who aren't failing. What you're really asking is why do we help them at all and instead give even the last 1% of help to those for whom everything is already given?

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