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The administration’s brief with the Supreme Court argues that even though the University of Texas at Austin was able to achieve substantial racial and ethnic diversity without using race—by giving a preference to low-income students and automatically admitting students in the top 10 percent of their high school—Texas was right to restore racial preferences in the freshman class beginning in 2005 so that the university would better reflect the state’s demographic breakdown.

This argument is plausible in the policy world but has never been accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court. In the 2003 decision upholding affirmative action, Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the decisive vote, said it is permissible to use race to achieve a “critical mass” of minority students to promote the educational benefits of diversity, but never suggested that it was appropriate to seek racial representation at universities with reference to a state’s demographic makeup. If the administration’s argument referencing statewide demographics would have had a hard time prevailing with the Supreme Court in 2003, it is very unlikely to convince a far more conservative Supreme Court today, in which a Grutter dissenter, Anthony Kennedy, is widely believed to hold the swing vote.

Some of the amicus briefs filed in support of Texas may actually hurt the case for racial preferences. Notable is a brief filed by the highly regarded and normally savvy dean of the University of North Carolina Law School, Jack Boger, on behalf of UNC Chapel Hill. According to the document, UNC admissions officers ran a simulation of what would happen if the university were to drop racial preferences and admit students from the top 10 percent of high-school classes in North Carolina. The brief indicates that racial and ethnic diversity would actually increase—from 15 percent to 16 percent “non-white and underrepresented students”—but the average SAT of entering pupils would decline by 55 points. This strikes me as a fairly damning admission. The Supreme Court so strongly disfavors state institutions using race to decide who gets ahead that it requires that the use of racial preferences be “necessary” to further a “compelling” purpose. I would be surprised if the justices found that avoiding a 55 point SAT decline truly meets this very high standard.

Indeed, while the onslaught of affirmative-action briefs from higher education on one level represents a sincere desire for greater racial equality, it has another less virtuous side to it. On the whole, higher education doesn’t wish to address deep class inequalities, which is why rich kids outnumber poor kids on selective campuses by 25 to 1. In addressing inequality, universities favor race-based affirmative-action programs, which tend to recruit middle- and upper-middle-class students of color, because they provide what Stephen Carter has called “racial justice on the cheap.” When universities have been banned from using race by state initiative or lower courts, by contrast, they have reluctantly adopted a number of somewhat costly (though highly worthy) programs to indirectly promote racial diversity.

Colleges have created new partnerships with disadvantaged high schools to improve the pipeline of low-income and minority students. Universities have given a preference in admission to low-income and working-class students of all races. They have expanded financial-aid budgets to support the needs of economically disadvantaged students. They have dropped legacy preferences for the generally privileged, and disproportionately white, children of alumni. They have adopted percentage plans like Texas’s, which grant access to students from low-income schools that had little history of sending graduates to selective colleges when racial affirmative action was in place.

Coming up with effective race-neutral alternatives is hard work, expensive, and certainly less “efficient” than racial preferences if one’s narrow goal is attaining a certain racial and ethnic representation in the student body. But the University of Texas’s experience proves that it can be done, even if such efforts may require sacrifices, such as postponing faculty salary increases to support expanded financial aid.

By defending the old regime of racial preferences, the Obama administration’s brief is likely to hand conservatives a winning political issue, as I noted recently in the New Republic. While some Republicans have been reluctant to raise the issue of affirmative action so as not to appear to be race-baiting, Mitt Romney has the political gift of a U.S. Supreme Court case, to be argued on October 10, which places the issue squarely on the national agenda. And now, Romney also has a clumsy administration brief that is both politically tone deaf and legally unpersuasive. President Obama was uniquely positioned to move the Democratic Party to a better place on affirmative action—one which recognizes that low-income students of all races deserve far better—and instead fell back on stale thinking that the Supreme Court is quite likely to dispose of in the coming months.

Hence my conclusion that the proposed closure of the University of Missouri’s press was a move of profound significance. When I first wrote about it, I could find little evidence of protest—I should have waited. The opposition to the closure is now loud and clear. An NPR interview with Bruce Joshua Miller, a publisher’s representative who has long worked with the press, provides context for both the proposed closure and for the momentum of the resistance. He’s interviewed by correspondent Lynn Neary:

LYNN NEARY: It was a miserable Memorial Day weekend for Bruce Joshua Miller. The publishers’ representative who has worked with the University of Missouri Press for 20 years had just learned that the small publishing house had lost its $400,000 subsidy from the university and would have to shut down. He was trying to figure out what he could do to support the press.

BRUCE JOSHUA MILLER: So I started a Facebook page and had a few people liked it. And, you know, it had 12 people, and I was excited because I had 28 people, and it just started to kind of mushroom from there.

That was Memorial Day. Yesterday I became the 2,679^th person to “like” Save the University of Missouri Press Facebook page. The protest doesn’t stop with the Facebook page. University president Tim Wolfe, whose background is exclusively corporate, has come under fire from other directions as well. The editors of the collected works of Langston Hughes, published by the press, wrote an open letter to Wolfe protesting the the closure, and as many as 29 authors of books published by the press have demanded the return of their publication rights, which would presumably fall into limbo were the press to close.

I think it’s accurate to say that Wolfe and the university administration has walked back its position to close the press absolutely—in light of the intensity of the opposition—but their solution, a hybrid university press of sorts, is imperfect to say the least. More on that next time.

The bubble also crosses paths with the pursuit of “sustainability” in another report, recently issued by Sterling Partners and Bain & Company. (No, not that Bain. That’s Bain Capital.) The Financially Sustainable University isn’t about the sustainability movement at all. Rather it deals directly with the higher-education bubble through an analysis of endowments, liabilities, expenses, and revenues of 1,700 public and private nonprofit colleges. Sterling and Bain’s straightforward idea is that colleges and universities shouldn’t let increases in expenses outrun increases in revenues, or countenance significant declines on assets relative to liabilities. Both happening at the same time ought to be especially worrisome: Somewhere in that direction lies financial insolvency.

The Chronicle article on the Sterling and Bain report notes that the period of study, 2005-2010, included one very bad year for college endowments, which may have skewed some of the results. Some colleges and universities are so wealthy that they are practically immune from those losses and, anyway, their endowments have since recovered. But Sterling and Bain stand by their larger claim that about a third of American colleges and universities have unhealthy financial outlooks. In a word, they are unsustainable.

The details are of considerable interest. As the Chronicle summarizes: Growth in college debt and the rate of spending on interest payments, plant, property, and equipment “rose far faster than did spending on instruction from 2002 to 2008 for the colleges studied.” The Chronicle continues:

long-term debt increased by 11.7 percent, interest expenses by 9.2 percent, and property, plant, and equipment expenses by 6.6 percent. Meanwhile, instruction expenses increased by just 4.8 percent.

The report itself puts these figures in the context of what’s happened to the revenue streams that colleges and universities relied on as more or less ever-blooming:

In the past, colleges and universities tackled this problem [rising liabilities] by passing on additional costs to students and their families, or by getting more support from state and federal sources. Because those parties had the ability and the willingness to pay, they did. But the recession has left families with stagnant incomes, substantially reduced home equity, smaller nest eggs and anxiety about job security. Regardless of whether or not families are willing to pay, they are no longer able to foot the ever-increasing bill, and state and federal sources can no longer make up the difference.

For the most part Sterling and Bain are quiet about what is driving those increased costs. They are more interested in the cake than in the ingredients. But they do capture some of the ingredients. They speak for example about “the Law of More,” i.e. “the assumption that the more they build, spend, diversify and expand, the more they will persist and prosper.” But the Law of More has met its match: “The opposite has happened: Institutions have become overleveraged.”

Sterling and Bain offer mostly anodyne solutions along the lines of “stay true to your core business” and say no to expansion that takes you outside that business. They allow that “the history and culture of universities” makes that difficult but they call on trustees and presidents “to put their collective foot down.” Cuts should be made “farthest from the core of teaching and research.”

To my ear that sounds like “diversity” and “sustainability” should be on the list for special scrutiny, but the report judiciously steers clear of saying what lies out there in the target-rich world of “farthest from the core.” Rather it notes the “fragmentation” of data-center management, “redundancy” in procurement, “unneeded hierarchy” in the form of “too many middle managers,” “misaligned incentives,” and unnecessary “complexity.”

I see nothing to disagree with in that list, but Sterling and Bain have dodged the problem of what pulls universities away from their core “business” of teaching and research. The magnet that pulls the compass off true north is ideology. Let me go back to that report I wrote about in Green Acres.

Magnets

Advocacy organizations such as the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment and Second Nature push an agenda (in the case of these two, “sustainability”) that doesn’t acknowledge that the institution serves any higher or better purpose than the ideals of the advocates. ACUPCC and Second Nature make that explicit. Second Nature’s mission statement, for example, declares:

Second Nature’s mission is to create a sustainable society by transforming higher education. We accelerate movement toward a sustainable future by serving and supporting senior college and university leaders in making healthy, just, and sustainable living the foundation of all learning and practice in higher education. [Emphasis added]

NACUBO is best known as a sober-sided organization of business officers, but it too has been infected with ideological enthusiasm. Among its publications is Ben Barlow’s Financing Sustainability on Campus, “developed in partnership with Second Nature,” and offering dramatically un-business-like counsel. The book “shatters the myth of funding first, operational change second.” The path to sustainability apparently lies through the pleasant valley of unfunded liabilities. NACUBO’s president John Walda is a sustainability enthusiast who has made the topic a major focus of the organization, which has produced a stream of books such as Boldly Sustainable: Hope and Opportunity For Higher Education in the Age of Climate Change, and Critical Path Issues on the Way to Carbon Neutrality.

Enthusiasm

The recommendations that NACUBO, ACUPCC, and Second Nature have offered in their report seem unlikely to travel very far. But it is hard to tell. Some of the recommendations might be within reach of Presidential fiat or administrative rule-making. The report argues that what is needed in the case of grants is not new legislation but Congressional action to fund a section (section 471) of the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act.

But these advocacy organizations are just one dimension of the problem. “Diversity” and “sustainability” have achieved a kind of magical immunity on many campuses from cost-benefit analysis and even rational scrutiny. I was astonished when one comment leaver on the Green Acres article declared:

I would submit that whatever it costs to be sustainable and diverse is immaterial, as these profit everyone in many intangible ways – we call it serving the common good.

And found my sights too “narrow” and “cynical” to take in the sheer niceness that the pursuits of diversity and sustainability achieve, free of the soul-crimping pettiness of the bean counters.

Of course, diversity and sustainability have real costs, even if they aren’t properly counted or disclosed, and such ideas can and should be subject to critical scrutiny. I’ve been doing my part in developing critiques of both movements. The dysfunctions in higher education’s financial model seem likely to make these matters more urgent. The “common good,” as my correspondent phrases it, isn’t achieved by pretending that we can ignore costs and bypass reason. Ostriches may achieve a certain moral clarity but we would do better from a higher vantage point.

UT Austin faces an uphill battle because the Supreme Court has long held that race can be used to promote diversity in higher education only if it is “necessary”; Kennedy has emphasized that race should be used as a “last resort,” where race-neutral means won’t suffice. For years, supporters of affirmative action argued that no workable alternatives existed for creating racial diversity. In the words of Justice Harry Blackmun’s opinion in the 1978 Bakke case: “I suspect that it would be impossible to arrange an affirmative action program in a racially neutral way and have it successful. To ask that this be so is to demand the impossible. In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way.”

But UT Austin did find another way. As the UT brief acknowledges, in the fall of 1996, using race in admissions, UT Austin’s freshman class was 4.1 percent African American and 14.5 percent Hispanic. When UT Austin was temporarily barred from using race by a lower court, it adopted a socioeconomic affirmative-action plan and a program to admit students in the top 10 percent of every high-school class which resulted, in 2004, in a freshman class that was 4.5 percent African American and 16.9 percent Hispanic—marginally more diverse than under the race-based plan.

Faced with these facts, the UT Austin brief makes two central arguments to suggest that its race-neutral plans were nevertheless inadequate, justifying the reinsertion of race after 2004. First, UT suggests that diversity at the school-wide level is insufficient; what’s truly important is diversity at the classroom level. Even with the 2004 levels of diversity, there were thousands of classroom in which black and Latino students “were nearly non-existent,” the brief argues.

Second, UT suggests, the class-based affirmative-action and top-10-percent plans didn’t produce sufficient levels of socioeconomic diversity within the student body’s black and Latino communities. Those admitted through the 10-percent plan were more likely “to be the first in their families to attend college,” for example, than those admitted through a racial preference. Having wealthier black and Latino students in the mix, Texas argues, is critical to the process of “breaking down racial stereotypes” that other students might have.

Will these arguments fly with the Supreme Court? Shifting the traditional focus from schoolwide diversity to classroom diversity seems unlikely to convince a majority of the justices, as there are mathematical challenges to ever ensuring a critical mass of students in all classrooms. Such a requirement is likely to raise concerns that the use of race could be justified for many, many years into the future.

And the argument for using race to admit more advantaged students of color highlights the very weakest moral argument for affirmative action. President Obama himself recognized this when he suggested that his own daughters, as fairly privileged students, do not deserve an affirmative-action preference. Rich kids of all colors predominate at selective universities, and research finds that 86 percent of African Americans at these institutions are middle- or upper-middle class. Besides, wealthier students of color are, on average, the candidates most likely to qualify for admission on the merits. Texas’ innovation—to draw in greater numbers of low-income students of all races—is precisely what’s missing in American higher education today.

Next week, the amicus briefs for supporters of affirmative action are due to be filed. Advocates of racial preferences should hope that stronger arguments can be mustered than have been by the University of Texas itself.

Spreading the Wealth, however, bears directly on the economic prospects of higher education. Kurtz’s provocative thesis is that under bland-sounding labels such as “regionalism” and “Building One America,” Obama has laid the regulatory groundwork for curtailing the political autonomy and the economic vitality of the nation’s suburbs. He traces Obama’s animus against the suburbs back to his days as a community organizer and traces the community organizers Obama worked with in the 1980s and 1990s forward to their participation in White House meetings during Obama’s presidency. A principal figure in this is Mike Kruglik, a longtime community organizer who was one of Obama’s first bosses in Chicago in the 1980s, and who remains one of Obama’s close confidants and White House guests.

According to Kurtz, the “regionalists” have both a visceral dislike of the suburbs and a theory about why they are bad. The dislike takes the form of disdain for the supposed blandness, comfort, and conformity of middleclass life, and is, of course, a familiar part of the left’s critique of American consumerist culture. Obama puts it in his own words in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, where he denounces the companies and the people who had left the city behind:

The big manufacturers had opted for well-scrubbed suburban corridors, and not even Gandhi could have gotten them to relocate near [south Chicago] anytime soon.

Kurtz does nice work in tracing the theme in Obama’s writings of his growing rejection of that part of himself that identified with the comforts of the suburbs in favor of his studied commitment to urban grittiness.

The theory is also fairly familiar: The social and economic inequities suffered by inner-city blacks and other minority communities are traceable to white flight to the suburbs. The suburbs are, in their essence, enclaves of white privilege which effectively doom the people left behind in the cities to meager opportunities and economic hardship. The solution, in the Kruglik-Obama view of things, is to use federal clout to disestablish suburbia. Although this could take the form of outright annexation of some suburbs by nearby cities, the regionalists realize that such actions would be hugely controversial. The quieter, less controversial approach is to build political alliances and institutional connections that will effectively integrate inner ring suburbs with cities and leave outer ring suburbs isolated and vulnerable to further forms of expropriation.

Electoral Implications

Kurtz’s thesis can, of course, be dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Perhaps it is that, but only if you stretch the word “conspiracy” to encompass political programs that have been plainly stated and open to public view. It is not as if “regionalism” is a secret agenda. It has numerous spokesman and a long record of public exposition. It just hasn’t registered yet with the public as a serious White House theme.

This could change. After the 2008 presidential election, CNN reported that 50 percent of voters living in the suburbs voted for Obama (48 percent voted for McCain). A shift in support among suburbanites might be crucial this November.

But my goal here is not to follow each step of Kurtz’s exposition, or to recommend a candidate. Rather, I am interested in one point where his argument converges with a topic I’ve been following closely for the last year: the higher education bubble.

Pincers

The biggest question about the bubble is what will pop it. The incredibly high prices colleges and universities are charging for undergraduate-degree programs combined with the rapidly decreasing cachet of the baccalaureate degree, high rates of underemployment among college graduates, and the insupportable levels of student-loan debt make a “market adjustment” unavoidable.

I have argued that among the factors most likely to precipitate the crash is the disaffection of families earning over $100,000 a year. Many of these families have seen the value of their home equity fall but have, with hard effort, kept their noses above water during the recession. The income bracket of $100,000 to $250,000—called “HENRYs” in marketing parlance, for High Earners who are Not Rich Yet—are a key sector for colleges and universities. These are the folks who borrow to the hilt to afford overpriced college tuitions. The bracket above the HENRYs, those earning over $250,000, are another key to higher-education finance. There are only about two million such families, but they are the top-end consumers of expensive colleges. Their willingness to pay top dollar is what signals to the HENRYs that the tuitions must be worth it.

These high income families—$100,000 and above—are concentrated in the suburbs. I have already written (Helium, Part 2) on the likelihood that these families will be forced to rethink their longstanding assumptions about the value of expensive colleges in light of the huge tax increases set to kick in after the 2012 presidential election. In the “ecology of higher education,” we are about to see what happens when we torch the canopy.

Kurtz’s book suggests that the assault on the HENRYs and the $250 K plus crowd goes beyond income and capital-gains taxes. We are in an era of emergent policy aimed at deconstructing what makes the suburbs attractive to the affluent. The “regionalists” advocate something called “regional tax base sharing,” which essentially means using state legislative power to take tax receipts from the suburbs to pay for services in the cities. The suburbanites will be faced with the unpleasant choice between lower levels of service for their own communities or raising their own taxes still higher to make up for the money they will “share” with their urban neighbors.

The regionalists’ proposals are mostly but not entirely financial. Regionalists also think, for example, that we can improve urban schools by imposing policies that force suburban schools to relinquish their autonomy. And they hope to impose further costs and restrictions on drivers to herd suburbanites to mass transportation.

These are matters that faculty members, even those who enjoy life on campuses idyllically tucked away in verdant suburbs, will probably weigh lightly. But the regionalists are, in effect, working hard to diminish the attractions of the communities that form the social base for the prestige-oriented upscale colleges and universities that have for the last sixty or seventy years defined the aspirational goals of the American middle class. The war on the suburbs combined with the large increase in the tax burden may be the pincers that pop the bubble.

Today, I want to talk about some recent data published by Harry. Harry has come up with a way of measuring by state the degree of admissions selectivity. He looks at the percentage of students ranking in the top 10 percent of their high-school class, plus the SAT composite score for those at the 25th percentile in the distribution of such scores. He sums data across the many state colleges and universities in each state to get statewide average figures.

According to Harry’s reckoning, the most selective (highest admissions standard) states in the nation are Florida, Virginia, Delaware, Washington, Maryland, New Jersey, South Carolina, Iowa, Michigan, and Georgia. The least selective (lowest admissions standard) states are Alaska, Maine, West Virginia, Idaho, New Mexico, Utah, Rhode Island, North Dakota, Arkansas, and South Dakota.

Do differential admissions standards make a big difference in college academic performance? The answer, unequivocally, is “yes.” The 10 highest admission standards states listed above had an unweighted average sophomore-retention rate of 82.9 percent, meaning about 17 percent of entering freshmen did not go on to the sophomore year. Amongst the lowest admission standards state, the retention rate was only 71.5 percent, meaning 28.5 percent of entering freshmen never made it into the sophomore year—two-thirds greater a proportion.

The data hold if one looks at four-year graduation rates. For the high-admissions states, the mean is 37.3 percent, nearly double the 19.2 percent for the low-admissions states. Do the low-admissions states narrow the gap by students going five or six years to school? No. The six-year graduation rate for the high-admissions states averages 62.3 percent, compared with 43.1 percent for the low-admissions states. In short, most kids in the high-admissions states do graduate, while a majority in the low-admissions state do not, at least within six years.

In short, one can predict with some certainty what the impact of lowering standards in the name of greater educational access will be in terms of student prospects for tests. High-school rank and SAT test results are good predictors of success. States that say “we want to give everyone a chance for a bachelor’s degrees so we are going to admit nearly everyone who applies” might feel good about themselves—but they have far greater numbers of poor college students who then drop out of school without a diploma, but in many cases with college-loan debts and no degree allowing them access to good-paying jobs.

Harry estimates the costs to the taxpayers of dropouts and it is considerable—about $12-billion annually nationally by his calculation. Thus admitting students with little realistic prospect for success is pretty costly to taxpayers, as AT THE MARGIN the proportion of the less-good students admitted who graduate is doubtlessly quite small.

The moral of the story is that there are no free lunches. Lofty aspirations, like “everyone should have a chance at college,” come at a cost, not only to taxpayers and to society, but also to individuals who sometimes directly suffer significantly from the unintended consequences of some well-intended policy discussions.

Charles Murray is dubious about “everyone going to college” on intellectual capacity grounds. Jackson Toby is dubious about open admissions in terms of its impact on academic quality and declining high-school standards. I have been dubious on the grounds of labor market imbalances and high costs. Harry Stille’s data provide further support for those whose raise a caution light if not a stop sign with regards to the “College for Everyone” movement.

Many have written eloquently about the plight of contingent labor—Marc Bousquet and Paul Lauter chief among them (and Lauter was calling our attention to this scandal in the ‘70s). The problem of anonymous student evaluations has been less widely publicized over the decades that it has come to be universal practice. But there has been considerable debate in journals of education, and the consensus, not surprisingly, is that there is a distinct correlation between high grades and positive student evaluations.


The practice of anonymous student evaluations has, as we all know, been commercialized and put on steroids by ratemyprofessors.com, a Web site that rates 1.7 million postsecondary instructors in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., and is (appropriately) owned by Viacom via MTV. Each instructor, as many of you know, I’m sure, receives an overall score which is broken down into three categories: “helpfulness,” “clarity,” and most disturbingly, “easiness.” The “easiness” category provides students with the perfect instrument for boosting their G.P.A. Simply choose the instructors with the highest “easiness’ ratings and your grades are bound to improve. In other words, Rhea’s situation is a microcosm of what goes on between disgruntled students and instructors every day in academia. If you “humiliate your students” (however humiliation might be construed, or if your teaching methods are “unorthodox,” then you’re not “easy.” But since when did easiness become a cornerstone of good teaching?


It’s far too optimistic to think that the appellate court’s decision will open the door to sunshine laws when it comes to student evaluations, but it might be an interesting start. In any case, a better way of assessing teaching is long overdue. I think we need to question the whole purpose of and necessity for anonymity. At my institution, discursive student evaluations are written up while I’m out of the room, and delivered to an administrator by a student volunteer from the class. I don’t get to see them until I’ve turned in grades for the course. So why do the evaluations have to be anonymous? I’ve gotten my share of critical evaluations, but so long as they were rational I never objected to them and often learned from them. But I’ve also, over the years, gotten defamatory evaluations, and been as infuriated by them as I have by any of the garbage I’ve read on ratemyprofessors. I doubt I would have gotten these had the students been required to sign them.

To be sure, the report concedes that for-profit education is here to stay, and even acknowledges that several providers (e.g., Strayer Education) have done a relatively good job, and others are at least making some positive moves (including Apollo, the owner of the University of Phoenix, the market leader). But the report appears far more negative than positive, while essentially ignoring problems with marginally performing public institutions that, unlike the for-profits, receive direct taxpayer subsidies.

A central point of the Harkin report is that at a big sample of for-profit institutions, over 40 cents of each dollar collected goes for marketing expense or profits, meaning a somewhat lower proportion goes for instruction than at a typical not-for-profit university. The inference is that students and learning are neglected.

This is a meaningless comparison on lots of grounds. Let us take profits. First, the 19-cent profit margin reported is pre-tax—unlike other colleges, the for-profits pay income taxes, some of which subsidize their competitors. Second, the not-for-profits have vast expenditures for constructing buildings, etc., not counted in operating expenses. Profits are a market-based assessment of the cost of the use of capital resources by private entrepreneurs. Given the risks associated with doing business (some of it imposed by Senator Harkin himself), the profit margin for the for-profits appears to be roughly in line with other parts of America’s capitalistic system. In a real sense, the for-profit higher-education sector uses honest accounting rules, the traditional sector dishonest ones, often not properly accounting for depreciation of capital or, especially at state schools, honestly assessing pension liabilities. In a sense, Harkin is comparing apples to oranges.

It is true that for-profits spend more on marketing expenses. There is a vast literature on the economics of advertising that argues ads serve a legitimate and important informational function, leading to more informed consumer choices. Moreover, some expenses in this category involve  schools’ marketing their students in job markets, something woefully neglected and underfunded by many traditional universities. The for-profits have learned that happy customers who get good jobs are good word-of-mouth advertising, so they devote more resources to this function than other schools, to the benefit of both the students and the institutions.

It is true that many of the for-profits have high drop-out rates, but are they really any worse than some of our public universities, like the University of Texas at San Antonio or Chicago State University, schools with thousands of students but very low graduation rates? Should we impose some sort of  selective admission standards on all schools wanting government handouts? I suspect that if one compiled a list of all institutions where the six-year graduation rate was below, say, 40 percent, a larger number of students would  attend public as opposed to for-profit institutions. The attack on the for-profits is an attack based on ideology, a dislike of capitalism, more than on a comprehensive and objective concern for students. The clearly one-sided nature of Harkin’s criticism may be one reason that his report was not issued by all the Democrats on the Senate education committee—my guess is some did not want to be associated with this unbalanced attack.

Now to Elijah Cummings, representative from Maryland, who issued a report (again from himself, not even all the Democrats on his committee), attacking high executive compensation at for-profit schools. It is true that the CEO’s of organizations like Apollo, Strayer, DeVry and Bridgepoint make very good money, often far more than the heads of large state or private universities. But they also take bigger risks, deserve combat pay for facing opposition from the likes of Tom Harkin, etc. Moreover, their pay is not out of line with what heads of comparable-sized for-profit companies in other sectors make.

Less time should be focused on dumping on 10 percent of higher education, and more on the truly big problems Congress is ignoring. For starters, how has the now-mammoth  federal involvement in financing student higher education affected costs, student performance, low-income student college participation and labor-market success of graduates?  Why should the federal government allow accreditation reports of schools receiving federal funds to remain hidden from public scrutiny? Should federal tax exemptions be granted for building sky boxes or funding sport “scholarships” to fuel an athletic arms race that has brought corruption and scandal to higher education? The list goes on and on. Stop trashing the 10 percent—focus on the 100 percent. Are there fly-by-night operators in the for-profit sector? Yes, and they should not receive federal subsidies. But that could be said about some traditional schools as well.

Dr. Rosenberg takes strongest exception to my statement that too many students are going to college. His exception, however, is grounded on a quiet emendation of what I said, and several of the comment leavers have noticed this.  Education, in my view, is among the highest of human goods and I would not want to deprive anyone of the opportunity to pursue it.  But education and enrollment in over-priced college-degree programs are not one and the same thing.

Most readers here have no doubt run across President Garfield’s quip in his 1871 address to the alumni of Williams College: “Give me a log cabin in the center of the state of Ohio, with one room in it and a bench with Mark Hopkins on one end of it and me on the other, and that would be a college good enough for me.” (Hopkins, a legendary teacher, was the president of Williams, 1836-1872.)

We pursue education in many ways: by reading, conversing, solving problems, arguing out propositions, researching, writing essays, and—sometimes—having the opportunity for disciplined study in a community of scholars. But the last is neither necessary nor sufficient. And it is an opportunity that is plainly of little value to the third or so of college students who graduate (according to Arum and Roksa’s study based on the Collegiate Learning Assessment) with the same level of intellectual skill they had as entering freshmen.

Dr. Rosenberg offers me a cornucopia of errors to correct, but I’ll pick just two more grapes from the feast.

He refers to the statistics that the U.S. falls behind other countries in the percent of the population that holds associate’s degrees or higher, and suggests that this poses a danger to the nation’s prosperity. As I have pointed out several times in my Chronicle postings (see, for example, “Supersizing,” February 15, 2012), there is a very poor correlation between the percent of college-degree attainment in a nation and the nation’s overall prosperity.  Russia leads the world in college-degree attainment among 25- to 64-year-olds and among 25- to 34-year-olds, both at 54 percent. No one thinks Russia has the world’s leading economy.  Switzerland (34 percent) and Germany (25 percent) have robust economies but smaller percentages of degree holders than the U.S. (We have 41 percent among 25- to 64-year-olds, according to a 2010 OECD; 38 percent according to the older OECD study Dr. Rosenberg apparently replied on.)

Dr. Rosenberg also offers the testimony of fellow task-force members in Minnesota and the employers they have conferred with, all of whom agree that higher education “is central to supplying the skilled talent” that business needs to thrive in the North Star state. I don’t doubt that business needs skilled labor, and that higher education is a gatekeeper, after a fashion. (It is, among other things, a legal gatekeeper, since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in 1971 in Griggs v Duke Power,  effectively banning the use of general-intelligence tests for sorting out potential employees. Griggs appears to have boosted college enrollments.) But it may be worth pointing out that business has no built-in reason to care what happens to students who, despite not having the talent or the self-discipline, enroll in college and then drop out; or, lacking real interest in what college has to offer, stick around to pick up their degrees but acquire little in the way of knowledge or skill along the way.

Business perhaps ought to be a little more concerned about the graduates of elite colleges who have acquired little but hostility for free enterprise and American institutions of self-government, and see themselves instead as enlightened “citizens of the world.” But that’s another story.