"Adults age 18 and older with a bachelor's degree earned an average of $51,554 in 2004, while those with a high school diploma earned $28,645, according to new tabulations released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. Those without a high school diploma earned an average of $19,169.

The series of tables, Educational Attainment in the United States: 2005, also showed advanced-degree holders made an average of $78,093."

"While phrases like freedom of speech and academic freedom are routinely invoked whenever there is a discussion of how professors should conduct themselves, classroom performance has nothing to do with such grand abstractions and everything to do with a simple injunction: do your job.

Of course, before you can do your job, you have to know what it is. And you will not be helped by your college's mission statement, which will lead you to think that your job is to cure every ill the world has ever known - not only illiteracy, bad writing and cultural ignorance, which are at least in the ballpark, but poverty, racism, ageism, sexism, war, exploitation, colonialism, discrimination, intolerance, pollution and bad character. (The list could be much longer.)

I can't speak for every college teacher, but I'm neither trained nor paid to do any of those things, although I am aware of people who are: ministers, therapists, social workers, political activists, gurus, inspirational speakers and diversity consultants. I am trained and paid to do two things (although, needless to say, I don't always succeed in my attempts to do them): 1) to introduce students to materials they didn't know a whole lot about, and 2) to equip them with the skills that will enable them, first, to analyze and evaluate those materials and, second, to perform independent research, should they choose to do so, after the semester is over. That's it. That's the job. There's nothing more, and the moment an instructor tries to do something more - tries to do some of the things urged by Derek Bok or tries to redress the injustices of the world - he or she will have crossed a line and will be practicing without a license."

Many health educators dismiss the idea of teaching sexual abstinence until marriage, thinking it leaves teens ignorant and ill prepared to make transitions to adulthood. However, a new study by the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., finds just the reverse, documenting that teens who heed the abstinence message-relative to those who do not-are less likely to drop out of high school and more likely to attend and graduate from college.

Looking at the rich data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), which interviewed a cohort of 14,000 teens in 1994, 1995, and 2001, researchers Robert Rector and Kirk Johnson found consistent and robust correlations between teen virginity and several positive academic outcomes. Most important, by narrowing the comparison among teens to those with identical social background characteristics, the researchers were able to isolate the effects of teen virginity from the effects of socioeconomic differences that might also account for such outcomes.

Controlling for parental education, race, gender, family structure, religiosity, and family income, their multivariate logistic regressions confirmed teen abstinence as a "significant and independent predictor of academic success," being associated with a 40 percent lower rate of high school expulsion, a 50 percent lower rate of dropping out of high school, a 70 percent increase in the probability of attending or graduating from college, and a 66 percent increase in college graduation.

These statistically significant correlations held firm even when girls who had given birth before 18 were excluded from the analysis, evidence that the academic differences were not due to the disruptive effects of non-marital pregnancy and childbearing. The associations also held in tests that controlled for the educational expectations of teens that were 16 and under at the time of the 1994 Add Health follow-up, evidence that abstinence contributes to higher academic outcomes independent of a teen's desire or expectations to attend college.

While not claiming that teen virginity directly causes academic achievement, the researchers nonetheless theorize that virginity both reinforces and reflects the academic capacities and personality traits that contribute to academic success. "Teens who abstain [from sexual relations] will be subject to less emotional turmoil and fewer psychological distractions; this will enable them to better focus on schoolwork." Furthermore, virgin teens "are likely to have greater future orientation, greater impulse control, greater perseverance, greater resistance to peer pressure, and more respect for parental and social values."