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 commodity. The near spontaneous creation of a national network of publicly funded community colleges massified American higher education.

What we should remember about each of these initiatives—in addition to their extraordinary impact on American colleges and universities in terms of who attends, who teaches, what is taught, and how research is paid for—was that they occurred a while ago and each involved substantial expenditures of public funds. Though such massive efforts are still regularly proposed, nothing much ever results.

Today the most effective advocates for the role public policy can play in reshaping American higher education are Pat Callan and Joni Finney (this month Joni joins me as a colleague in Penn’s higher ed program). In Measuring Up they regularly remind us that nearly four out of every five American college students are enrolled in a public college or university. They remain convinced that the path to meaningful reform leads directly to and through the state capitals that are responsible for the financial health of the institutions state legislatures fund.

I once shared that conviction and joined Pat and Joni in sponsoring a series of roundtables and Policy Perspectives essays that made clear the importance of state agencies to the reform process. I am no longer persuaded. While there remains the impulse to criticize, there simply is no willingness to make the investments that would spur the kind of reform (or at least change) that accompanied the rush of postwar initiatives that recast American higher education. Witness the kind of sputtering debate that now surrounds New York’s efforts to remake SUNY.

We will have to wait for a very long time if we expect state policy—or, for largely the same reasons, federal policy—to be an engine of change for American higher education.

I am running out of options: next, can proponents of programs of reform lead to changes in American higher education?