Worthless and Weak

I was thinking today: Colleges are typically defined by only 2 characteristics. First, the subject matter (technical vs liberal arts is the axis that I would use to describe it), and second, the competitiveness of the school. So, the simple model is that a prospective student identifies the subject matter he/she wishes to study, and tries to get into the best possible school that his grades/scores allow.

What I'm wondering is why isn't there more variety in the school selection. For instance, in high school, I will admit to not having worked very hard, although I do consider myself pretty smart. Therefore, I had lowish grades and highish test scores. (I'm willing to assume that at least 2/3s of kids with similar grades as I had lower test scores, while 2/3s of kids with similar SATs had higher grades than I).

It seems to me that there were no choices for this, and that, if done right, a college which specializes in smart kids who didn't work hard in school could do wonders. Ditto for colleges which specialize in kids who work their asses off, but aren't necessarily smart.

There are a few possibilities:

1. Such schools exist, I just don't know about them.

2. They wouldn't really work, as a degree which signals "lazy" would be much much worse than a degree from a random school. Therefore, the smart-but-lazy school would have to work the kids twice as hard as a normal school to combat this, and what smart-but-lazy kid is going to want to go to such a school?

3. Having an academically diverse student body is actually more advantageous than not. This I have a hard time believing, as I think the best way to teach is to have everybody in the classroom on the same page, so to speak. (To me, its useless having the teacher go faster than the student, especially in something like economics, math, or language. If you don't learn the previous thing, you're not going to learn the next thing).

Any thoughts?

-Garrett

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