Is it because students are enrolling in college who are increasingly ill-prepared and poorly motivated? Or is it because states are spending less on their colleges and universities? In today’s Pope Center piece, Jay Schalin looks at a recent NBER study that purports to find that it’s mostly the latter.

Jay is skeptical about that, and so am I. The NBER study finds, for example, that the average class size has increased from about 25 to 29. So what? We aren’t talking about grade schoolers who might need a lot of personal attention to learn, e.g., how to add fractions. College-age students shouldn’t be affected by class size. Whether it’s a class with 5 or 55, if you don’t get the material, you know that you have to seek additional help. My own experience was that weak students very rarely sought the help they needed no matter what the number of students in the class.