Matt Yglesias has been blogging a lot about  how progressives shouldn't let the general deregulatory enthusiasm of pro-business conservatives dissuade them from opposing regulatory regimes that benefit rent-seeking incumbent firms to the detriment of everyone else. This reminds me of a state higher-education regulatory issue that I imagine most people care little about: program approval.

States technically control access to the higher-education market by building public colleges and universities and chartering private nonprofit institutions, but that hardly ever happens anymore. Price controls are a mixed bag and hard to enforce—witness the proliferation of mandatory fees on many campuses that technically fall outside the umbrella of regulated tuition. In practice, state higher-education regulatory bodies spend a lot of time managing and approving individual programs at existing public ...

All featured in this Chronicle column, which looks at Ben Wildavsky's recently-published book about international higher education, The Great Brain Race.

Meanwhile, Wildavsky notes today that Yale University has announced a new, non-binding agreement with the National University of Singapore (NUS) to consider:

...joining with NUS as a full partner to establish "Yale-NUS College" in Singapore, with an intended opening in the fall of 2013. The College would be a highly selective, small, autonomous school within NUS, with approximately 1,000 undergraduate students in its early years. The College would award its degrees through NUS, not Yale. The College's separate governing board, half of which would be composed of Yale appointees, would have authority over curriculum, faculty appointments and admissions policies. The cost of establishing and operating the College would be borne by NUS ...

Last year Caroline Hoxby published an NBER working paper on college admissions in which she argued that elite colleges have become more selective over the last 50 years because "the elasticity of a student's preference for a college with respect to its proximity to his home has fallen substantially over time and there has been a corresponding increase in the elasticity of his preference for a college with respect to its resources and peers." That makes sense: travel, communication, and information are all much cheaper than they were in the 1960s.

But Hoxby also notes that the measure commonly used to bolster the idea of short-term tightening in admissions selectivity—the percent of applicants who are admitted at individual institutions—is basically worthless, because it includes an unknown but presumably large number of applicants who aren't serious candidates. If someone with 2.5 GPA a...

Contributing to The Chronicle's series of special reports on the higher education quality problem, Alexander McCormick says, "There’s lots of blame to go around, but I’ll single out faculty norms and the news media." I'm with him on the first part. But the media part, not so much. He says:

The news media usually focus on the wrong things. If the big story every year is which Ivy tops the rankings, or which campus is the biggest party school, we won’t ever focus on the real problems. And when the media do look at quality, they too often settle for simple answers to complex questions—flawed approaches that either reinforce the conventional wisdom (reputation and average SAT scores, for example) or ignore content and process (graduation rates). The media rarely ask tough questions about teaching and learning: What are we asking of our students? How do we know if we’re getting it? What are...

Earlier this year I flew to Rochester, Minnesota, where I learned how fast heat will depart from the human body if you're dumb enough to travel north of the 44th parallel in winter without proper insulation. (Answer: very.) I also visited the new branch campus of the University of Minnesota and wrote an article about it, which you can read here.

They're doing a lot of interesting things at UMR. (See also David Glenn's excellent profile in The Chronicle last year.) There are no academic departments and every undergraduate (the first class matriculated a year ago) is pursuing a B.S. in health sciences. Professors from the humanities and the sciences coordinate their curricula on a week-by-week basis, so a student might synthesize a compound like creatine in chemistry, design an experiment examining its effect on muscle fatigue in biology, debate the ethics of performance-enhancing drugs...

Ben Miller and Phuong Ly's expose of college dropout factories reminds me of many conversations I've had over the years with policy makers and foundation officials about helping more students earn college degrees. They tend to go like this: First, we need a "research strategy" to identify "best practices" that have a statistically significant impact on college graduation. Then we need a "dissemination strategy" to communicate those practices to administrators and practitioners. Colleges will adopt the best practices, and graduation rates will rise.

I think this is mostly wrong.

The article tells the story of Nestor Curiel, a former student at Chicago State University. Here's what happened:

With its tree-lined campus and gleaming new steel and glass convocation center, Chicago State certainly looked impressive. But within his first month there, Nestor wanted to leave. Advisers in the...

Wonks like me tend to support policies whereby colleges that receive public money are held accountable for numerical performance measures. People who actually work for colleges generally hate this idea. At the most extreme, they say it violates some kind of sacred principle of total institutional autonomy. More reasonable critics argue that quantitative measures of university quality are so unavoidably reductive, simplistic, and distortionary that creating an accountability system based on them would do more harm than good.

To the latter, let me offer the latest issue of Binghamton University Magazine, which features a lengthy ode to outgoing president Lois DeFleur, who recently stepped down after the Division I men's basketball program she championed collapsed in a wave of drugs, crime, academic misconduct, scandal and disgrace completing two decades of service to the Binghamton...

Alec MacGillis writes in the Post about higher education lobbyists fighting the Obama administration's plans to help more students graduate from college:

Sarah Flanagan, a lobbyist for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU), said the provisions crossed the line. They "put out national incentives and fund states and get states to get colleges to increase performance. That's not how colleges operate," she said.

That's true! They certainly don't.

During his higher education speech earlier this week, President Obama talked at some length about college costs:

Many of you are living each day with worries about how you’re going to pay off your student loans. (Applause.) And we all know why. Even as family incomes have been essentially flat over the past 30 years, college costs have grown higher and higher and higher and higher. They have gone up faster than housing, gone up faster than transportation. They’ve even gone up faster than health care costs, and that’s saying something. (Laughter.)

So it’s no wonder that the amount student borrowers owe has risen almost 25 percent just over the last five years. Think about that. Just in the last five years, the debt of students has done up 25 percent.

And this isn’t some abstract policy for me. I understand this personally, because Michelle and I, we had big loans to pay off...

The Education Trust released a report today documenting large graduation rate gaps between white, black, and Latino students at many colleges and universities. It includes a list of the worst offenders, the top of which is below, in descending order of disparity (the first number is the average six-year graduation rate for white students from 2006 to 2008, the second is the rate for black students):

Wayne State: 43.5 / 9.5

Cal State-Fresno: 55.9 / 24.1

Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania: 66.2 / 35.9

Kansas State: 60.7 / 30.5

The College of New Jersey: 87.5 / 58.7

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: 46.1 / 17.9

Cal State-Bakersfield: 47.2 / 19.2

Rowan University: 69.5 / 42.2

University of Wisconsin-Whitewater: 55.0 / 27.7

Wayne State stands out like a sore thumb on this list. It has the single biggest percentage-point gap between white and black students in America. The overall...