The subject is the interplay between cost and quality. Richard Vedder’s work, both before he joined and as a member of the Spellings Commission, focused on how American colleges and universities spend their monies and on the cost drivers that make American higher education so expensive without returning a commensurate quality premium. It’s the research that made Vedder among the best known and widely read of the nation’s efficiency pundits. Charles Miller, the chairman of the commission, regularly points out that American colleges and universities really don’t have a bottom line, and hence productivity and efficiency gains constantly elude them — though that observation is more true of the highly selective, most costly institutions than of the bulk of the colleges and universities responsible for educating most undergraduates. Taken together these arguments suggest that as a nation, we a...

The country bumpkin among the four horsemen of reform is quality — a term so bereft of practical meaning today that it is now commonplace to talk about high quality, higher quality, and highest quality as a means of distinguishing among nearly equal claims to excellence.

No one is against quality. Almost everyone is ready to concede that American higher education, whatever its faults and shortcomings, is the envy of the rest of the world and in that sense truly world class, perhaps even in a class by itself. Not so fast, says Jonathan Grayer, the former Newsweek marketing executive Washington Post picked to run its Kaplan subsidiary and who was in many ways the most interesting as well as the most unusual member of the Spellings Commission. Grayer’s role was principally to explain and where necessary defend the interests of the growing for-proftit educational sector. ...

The numbers that trouble me the most are those that document how educational access has not translated into educational success. While the percent of Americans with a college education has increased for all groups, the gap between minority and majority experiences has persisted largely unchanged. Given that a college degree is now the principal portal to middle-class status it is not acceptable that one’s ethnicity, in particular, remains a tag predicting likely success at reaching that destination. The problem, however, is not one of access — or at least the kind of access that is achieved by the removing of barriers be they legal, cultural, psychological, or financial. Providing equal educational opportunity — what I have taken to calling “access to success” — requires a different mind set and a willingness to invest public funds in programs other than federal student aid.

I have...

For more than 50 years unfettered access to a college education has been the stated goal of most higher-education policy. Everyone who wanted a college education, who had prepared themselves to earn the degree and had exhibited the discipline and stick-to-it-ness necessary to succeed deserved a chance. A person’s race or ethnicity or gender, his or her financial circumstances, political or religious beliefs, or physical incapacities could not be allowed to matter.

The term itself — access — reflected a deeply held belief that unfettered participation in the nation’s higher-education system required the elimination of those very real barriers that had historically limited participation to the advantaged few.

The first barriers to fall were products of racial and religious discrimination — outright legislated segregation in the one case and, in the other, a more subtle but no less...

Exactly how to make a college education more affordable is among the most intractable of the dilemmas facing higher education. Initially those who worried most about a college education’s affordability focused on public institutions and the fact that their increasing prices were directly related to per-student reductions in public appropriations by the nation’s 50 states. It seems unlikely, however, that the states will dramatically increase their support for higher education. What the states have discovered, in good times and bad, is that students and their families will pay more for their college educations, thus allowing the states to promote other spending priorities including the lowering of taxes.

More recently its has been the outrageousness of the tuitions of the nation’s most selective institutions that has drawn the media’s and policy makers’ ire. The problem is that these...

One of my stranger assignments as a member of the Spellings Commission was to co-chair, with Rich Vedder, the Affordability Task Force. Here truly was a punishment to fit the crime, since I had already made clear that I was finding the Commission’s discussion of affordability both linguistically confusing and politically risky.

To begin with, the argument that an American college education was becoming more unaffordable rested on the assumption that students and families were still expected to pay for college out of current earnings and savings. In fact, a college education had long since become something that one purchased over time, most often at interest rates that were sufficiently attractive that even families that could afford to pay their “parental contribution” out of pocket chose instead to borrow. Savvy middle-class families had long since discovered that it was smarter to...

The second of my four horsemen of reform — the quest for an affordable higher education — is for me the most problematic. This much is clear, however: an American college education has become ever more expensive. Some would say, with fair justification, paying for a college education in this country is now obscenely expensive. But ever-higher prices in higher education are nothing new. For more than a half century the average price, even the average net price, of a year in college has been increasing faster than the underlying rate of inflation, except during the decade of the 1970s when the average prices colleges and universities charged merely kept pace with double-digit inflation.

Those who push the affordability agenda parse the problem differently, having concluded that an American higher education is either now or about to become unaffordable. As Measuring Up 2004...

I am often surprised and occasionally dismayed by the comments our Brainstorm postings generate. But I never respond, knowing that to do so only invites more of the same. Some of the comments occasioned by Stan Katz’s celebration of Karen Arenson, however, need a response. What and how Arenson accomplished what she did are too important to be marginalized by nonsense.

What ever her background and personal proclivities, Arenson is no elitist. Her best work was devoted to the educational landscape of New York City, with its mélange of institutions of every stripe and persuasion. Her stories informed as well entertained, shocked as well as moved us. Collectively they formed a tapestry whose warp and woof were the accomplishments, failures, and inanities of the institutions to which she paid such exquisite attention.

Like every really good journalists she covered stories rather than...

Discussions of the need for increased accountability in higher education are mostly mindless. There is a presumption on the part of what I have come to call the “accountability police” that colleges and universities today are not accountable — paired with a reluctance to specify by whom and for what colleges and universities ought to be held accountable. There is just a sense that a college education today is too expensive and not worth the money given that college students are not learning enough. Finally there is the assumption that if the public had more data, accrediting agencies more power, and state governments more gumption the nation’s colleges and universities could finally be held accountable.

I keep trying to make sense of this argument. My current gambit is to imagine an accountability process that actually tests the quality of higher educational products — both courses an...

Being accountable ranks right up there with being nice and responsible. Not being accountable is the same as being selfish or out-of-control or irresponsible. Simply raising the subject is enough to put higher education on the defensive and its principal institutions on edge.

The implication is that higher education is not accountable to anything or anybody outside the academy itself — a charge that simply won’t hold water. What the critics who pursue the accountability agenda really mean is “higher education is not accountable to me!” What they don’t like is that colleges and universities are instead accountable to a market that favors selectivity, brand names, national visibility, winning sports teams, and, in the case of the nation’s medallion universities, major research portfolios.

Professional programs are also accountable to their cognizant accrediting agencies. In the fields ...