GETTING THE INCENTIVES RIGHT. Via Phi Beta Cons, another rage over the alleged neglect of the undergraduate.

Ninety-five percent of each college's score is based on measures of wealth, fame and admissions selectivity. As a result, college presidents looking to get ahead focus on marketing, fundraising and recruiting faculty with great research credentials instead of investing their resources in helping undergraduates learn and earn degrees.

This problem can't and shouldn't be fixed by government regulation. Independence and diversity make our higher-education sector strong, and that shouldn't change.

The way to drive higher education institutions to stop ignoring undergraduates in favor of pursuing research is to provide more information about their performance with undergraduates to the consumers who pay tuition bills: students and their parents.

By investing in new ways to gauge the quality of teaching and learning and by requiring taxpayer-subsidized colleges to disclose their performance to the public, the federal government can change the market dynamics in higher education, creating strong incentives for colleges to produce the caliber of undergraduates we need to compete in the global marketplace, incentives to make the rhetoric of being first in the world in higher education a reality.

The problem with the policy proposal, dear reader, is that it does nothing to address the positional arms race that is driving the popularity of the name colleges. As long as the alternative to the "you teach yourself, you have smart classmates, let me find a shorter proof of Fermat's Theorem" model of higher education (itself a mischaracterization of what goes on in the best universities) is a non-challenging degree program driven by an access-assessment-remediation-retention mindset, the oversubscribed Ivies, wannabes, and state flagships are going to have no reason to do things differently.