Chuckle, I went to one of them.
Here’s the crux of the issue. What’s the probability that students with scores that abysmal can do college level work and will graduate? I’d argue that for the vast majority of these students putting them in college wastes their time, our resources and, most importantly (assumption: they’ll augment the Pell grants with loans*), they’ll end up with onerous debt with little hope of paying it off since they didn’t graduate. If you don’t like 24/1200, is there a percentage where you’d cut things off? Or are you advocating they give it the ole college try regardless of outcomes?
It’s probably more accurately called a European or Asian model…not just Soviet. Thanks for the response. I enjoyed it.
*you can argue that the solution is to make the Pell grant bigger. That’s what I effectively did–same amount of $$$ spread out more generously across the higher payoff bets.