It’s difficult to imagine what Iowa State, or any school, could do to get around this fact: In general, you get out of your education precisely what you put into it.

Because of that fact, we applaud last week’s announcement that the Department of Residence will no longer employ Academic Resource Coordinators — not only because of the $200,000 in savings, critically needed by the department to address a budget shortfall, but also because the return on the expenditure had always been dubious at best.

We hasten to qualify: We’re not talking (only) about the effort put forth by the ARCs. Like any group of people (resident assistants and community advisers, for example), there are both good and bad ARCs. And the ones who gave up a lot of time, connected with their neighbors and did their best to point the way to hard-to-find academic resources deserve praise and thanks. They certainly made a difference — in the same way that anybody makes a difference in the life of a confused freshman just by being friendly and seeming interested.

But we question whether the good idea of ARCs really had evidence of efficacy to justify it.

If you live in the dorms now, think about your neighbors. If you’re off campus, think back to your neighbors when you lived in the dorms. (If neither describes you, you missed out on a good time. Sorry.)

Is anybody going to be convinced by an ARC — who may be many things, but at first blush has to be seen as a university employee — to change his or her outlook on college and on life? To drop the video game controller, to stop snoozing the alarm, to actually do the assigned reading — and do those things habitually?

It’s not happening like that, at least in our experience. The far more prevalent outcome is that students get a little bit of information about a couple of Iowa State’s fine student support offerings, maybe go to one supplemental instruction session, and then let their original B-/C+ inertia take over. It’s hard to see the economic value of this balancing room and board plus stipend, times 29.

Of course, this all takes place in the context of the Fresh Start program. It’s both easy and popular to criticize Fresh Start and its provisions as “baby-sitting” or “worthless.” The logical extension of our argument is that it’s impossible to change ingrained student attitudes about anything, including community service and alcohol use.

Far be it from us to argue with logic. The ineffectiveness of ARCs, evidenced by their elimination last week, is reflective of the real (not theoretical) usefulness of the Fresh Start program. Junk it and begin again.