It’s a good question. What was Harvard thinking? The cynics have two answers. The first is that Harvard wanted to sweep the table, making sure that only a handful of private universities could compete with it for the nation’s top high-school seniors. Though offered by Harvard as the explanation for its largess, the notion that the university needed to lower its price to attract more “moderate” income students doesn’t ring true. As Roger Lehecka and Andrew Delbanco pointed out in Tuesday’s New York Times, “surely this is not a very serious problem for a university that each year turns away hundreds of high-school valedictorians and whose yield (the percentage of admitted applicants who enroll) is around 80 percent.” Harvard may be arrogant, but it is not a bully.

Others suggest that Harvard’s true motive was to blunt Congressional calls for tougher regulations on how...

Harvard set the bar pretty high. Most private colleges can’t get over it.

Talk to a private college president or, even better, a private college CFO and be prepared for an afternoon of anguish. I have had several such conversations and each starts out pretty much the same — quiet consternation followed by a kind of confused anger expressed in the message “Why is Harvard doing this to me? It makes no sense. We don’t compete with Harvard, we don’t charge what Harvard charges, and we sure don’t have a $35-billion endowment that will allow us to provide the kind of financial aid that Harvard has so freely promised its upper income families. And yes, in our applicant pool, families with annual incomes in excess of $125,000 are decidedly upper income.”

What is likely to follow is the testimony of an exasperated college official who faces nothing but bad choices in trying to match...

The reverberations from Harvard’s stunning announcement that it had redefined middle income status to include families making up to $180,000 a year are just now coming into focus. To understand what Harvard has done to the rest of higher education it helps to first consider two sets of numbers. The first is reported growth in the value of the Harvard endowment from $14.3-billion in 1999 to 34.9-billion in 2007 — more than a doubling during a period of historically low inflation. In terms of funds available to be spent on education and research, that increase of more than $20-billion yields, at Harvard’s current 4.6% spending rate, $920-million per year.

The second set of numbers to consider are those associated with the cost to Harvard of its new financial aid scheme. According to the Chronicle’s writeup of the new Harvard plan, the university’s student aid budget will increase...

My postings over the last several weeks were occasioned by a question my friend and colleague Bill Massy posed. Once a quintessential insider — vaunted marketing professor, vice-provost for research, acting provost, CFO and chief administrative office, all at Stanford — Bill was now what I had come to call an outside-insider, in his case an educational researcher and consultant who no longer dwelt full-time within the academy. He was also someone I thought had little direct opportunity to change higher education writ large and I had told him so. “What are we to do?” he then asked, “Just stand idly by even though we know that American colleges and universities are not all they are supposed to be, that is, they could both do more and do it better?”

I am not going to blink on this one, though Bill comes remarkably close to being an exception to the rule I am proposing. In fact, it is...

Scratch a higher education wonk and you will find an outside-insider who believes the principal way to reform American colleges and universities is to use the levers of public policy. After all, the history of American higher education is replete with examples of governmental action that changed the academy. The Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862 remains the most cited example, but in fact it was the burst of public initiatives following the Second World War that created what we have come to see as a uniquely American system of higher education. The GI Bill of Rights got the federal government in the student aid business. Vannevar Bush’s Science, the Endless Frontier led to the creation of the federal research agenda that created the modern research university. The rapid expansion by most states of their public colleges and universities made higher education a public...

The question on the table is from my last posting, “Can Only Insiders Change Higher Education?”

Richard Hersh and John Merrow spent more than a year compiling a two-part documentary and accompanying volume of essays with the provocative title Declining by Degrees — Higher Education at Risk. To save the enterprise, Merrow and Hersh, each a prominent outside-insider — promised to blow “higher education’s cover.” Their avowed model was the 1983 report “A Nation at Risk,” which made fixing elementary and secondary education a national priority. Now it was an “insidious erosion of quality” across higher education that “places this nation at risk.” Finding a remedy would necessarily begin with “a national conversation about higher education. No longer can our colleges and universities be allowed to drift in a sea of mediocrity. The stakes are high, but we know that many Americans...

My friend Bill Massy isn’t comfortable with my assertion that only insiders, in fact only core faculty members, are in a position to change higher education. To make his point he presented me with the following query. “Suppose, “ he said, “somebody outside the academy felt it was imperative that higher education change direction. Further suppose that the person I have in mind is what you have called an ‘outside-insider,’ somebody who has spent all or part of his or her life working for a public agency responsible for higher education policy — someone like Pat Callan; or again, somebody like me, a former professor and senior administrator at Stanford who is now a full-time higher education consultant and researcher; or somebody like John Merrow (the TV writer and producer responsible for the PBS documentary “Declining by Degrees-Higher Education at Risk”); or even Charles Miller of the...

Margaret Spellings is a class act — smart, tough, and resilient. Yesterday she did what she had to do. She pulled the plug on her department’s attempt to federalize accreditation in order to force that process to focus on testable learning outcomes. The lesson she learned, I suspect, is that higher education really is different.

Paradoxically it is both more fractured and better organized than the nation’s K-12 systems. More important, at its core is a professoriate that owns the teaching/learning process lock, stock, and barrel. You cannot change higher education with out enlisting both the energies and enthusiasm of a significant portion of us. The question that Spellings’ reform efforts has left unanswered — unaddressed really — is how does one make that happen? More on Friday.

On Sunday an anonymous New York Times headline writer made it official, echoing what Governor Eliot Spitzer apparently knew all along: What SUNY on behalf of the State of New York needs is a Berkeley. The idea makes for a nice headline but the Berkeley that is being dreamed of is a thing of the past — a truly public university that uses nearly unlimited public appropriations to pursue its own ideals. It would have been better policy — but not as nice a headline — to say what SUNY needs is a University of Michigan, a place that has learned to practice being market smart so it can remain mission centered even when public funds become embarrassingly scarce.

Actually the whole comparison is more than a little scary. In ways the headline writers never comprehend SUNY is truly unique — a state system that is fully comprehensive. I have no doubt that SUNY needs and deserves more money ...

Martin Meyerson would occasionally remind me that what was important to remember about Casandra was not that she was right, but that she was not believed. As a member of the Spellings Commission, I tried my level best first to convince Charles Miller and then the members of the commission that we ought to leave accreditation alone. To wade into that subject was like trying to walk on quick sand. The accreditation industry itself was too disorganized to help, institutions would not take seriously structural reforms pushed by the accreditation process, and the challenge of putting sufficient muscle into the accrediting process was beyond the political acumen of the Department of Education. Better to try to work directly with Congress or better yet find another lever with which to promote change.

This week’s story in The Chronicle that the Department of Education would not push ...