Free enterprise education

Every time I hear about how private schools will only select the best students, I hit them with two examples. 1) The literally thousands of kids who were underperforming and got help from Sylvan Learning Centers - a free market means of addressing weaker student performance. 2) The much more private US college and university system which performs vastly better than do public schools. It even has a classic case of distortion to show why socialism doesn't work - affirmative action in admissions, which, more than anything else, misallocates minority collegians in such a way that many "beneficiaries" of AA drop out becasue they cannot compete when they might otherwise have done just fine at a school a bit less demanding, say UCLA instead of Caltech.

Fletch,
I would go one step further and say that AA in college admissions actually harms more then it helps.

Because so many of them find their way out of colleges that they may not have been right for, this leads them to reject ALL colleges. Rather then try again, at another school, they will give up any higher education, leading to full "disenfranchisement."

Of course some will push for further relaxing of standards to make up for this, but this then leads to further disenfranchisement at the job market. The answer, of course, is to do away with AA altogether.