Joseph C. Hermanowicz is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Georgia.

His previous works include the books, The Stars Are Not Enough: Scientists - Their Passions and Professions (U Chicago, 1998), and dozens of articles and conference papers, mostly focusing on student, parent and faculty satisfaction with the academic experience.

Everyone who has come in contact with American higher education, whether their relationship has been brief and fleeting or long-lived and intimate, has been exposed to one of the few phenomena shared by the more than 3500 motley schools in the system: college attrition. Parents, friends, relatives, high school teachers and guidance counselors, college administrators, faculty and advisors all know attrition, albeit from different vantage points. They know attrition not necessarily by the cold-blooded statistics (though some may) but more probably by the warm-blooded stories of students who have experienced college departure, those whose vantage points are undoubtedly the most direct and personal.

There is indeed irony in the thought that the failure to educate is the single principal attribute binding schools together in the highly differentiated system we call education. While schools do educate, and do so in relatively large numbers, and thus produce and transmit knowledge as their function prescribes, they do so in proudly different ways that yield different outcomes and identities, both collective and individual. When schools lose students, they fail, and their outcome and identity are one.