WHAT HAS BEEN GOING ON ON YOUR WATCH? Inside Higher Ed's Kati Haycock has disturbing news.

Over the past decade, the United States has slipped to 17th in the developed world in high school graduation rates, and seventh in college-entry rates. And we are no longer first in the proportion of young people completing a college degree.

What is to be done?

This is not acceptable. If our nation is to continue as a world leader, institutions of higher education must assume responsibility for helping every student they admit succeed. Right now, student success is not part of the way institutions of higher education — or the people who run them — are evaluated.

Under what standards are those students being admitted? And is it really true that success is not part of the evaluation? Ms Haycock directs something called the Education Trust ... is she that innocent of the legislative proctology that has been going on the past 15 or 20 years? Her prime concern appears to be class and race stratification, but read this:

While these disturbing patterns — low overall graduation rates and big gaps between groups — have remained stubbornly consistent, the consequences of not graduating have changed drastically. People with a four-year degree or higher now earn much more relative to high school graduates than they did 30 years ago, and the gap increases with the level of the degree.

Yes, and that's precisely the years over which the universities have been devoting more resources to access, diversity, and retention. Perhaps it's time for some new thinking about these tired nostrums.

Congress should first support state efforts to align the standards for exiting high school with those for beginning postsecondary study. With a relatively small investment, lawmakers could help states make sure that students don’t fall between the cracks separating high school from college, including linking their K-12 and higher education data systems.

Got a problem, pass a law. Where is the admissions office that will credibly commit itself to the following: No admission if you're not ready for college? No remedial courses, whether for credit, or not.

Second, Congress should provide more money to students by committing to a five-year trajectory to recoup the buying power of Pell Grants. The financial burden of paying for college is a huge barrier for many young people. Low-income young people are particularly hard hit, because the relative value of Pell Grants has diminished by 50 percent since the late 1970s. Whereas Pell Grants used to cover 84 percent of the average fixed cost at a public, four-year institution, in 2001-02 they covered only about 40 percent of these costs.

These grants are also a massive inducement for administrators to raise tuitions, for publishers to churn marginal revisions of textbooks at inflated prices, and for grant recipients to study less.

Ms Haycock would just as soon punt on the main problem.

Of course it would certainly help if more young people entered college well prepared and if they didn’t have to struggle to cover college costs, but preparation and ability to pay only tell part of the story.

Don't you just love that "of course" serving to rule the real solutions out of bounds? Wisconsin's tourism industry is importing summer help. The high schools are passing their academic deficiencies along to two-year and four-year colleges. There's a lot more to be done in the areas of preparation and obtaining resources that doesn't involve more of the same failed therapeutic regime.