THE ISSUE IS INSUFFICIENT SELECTIVITY. A Harvard graduate who interviews prospective students reflects on the lengths aspirants go to.

What kind of kid doesn’t get into Harvard? Well, there was the charming boy I interviewed with 1560 SATs. He did cancer research in the summer; played two instruments in three orchestras; and composed his own music. He redid the computer system for his student paper, loved to cook and was writing his own cookbook. One of his specialties was snapper poached in tea and served with noodle cake.

At his age, when I got hungry, I made myself peanut butter and jam on white bread and got into Harvard.

He goes on to note that there are, in fact, multiple pursuits of happiness.

I came to understand that my own focus on Harvard was a matter of not sophistication but narrowness. I grew up in an unworldly blue-collar environment. Getting perfect grades and attending an elite college was one of the few ways up I could see.

My four [children] have been raised in an upper-middle-class world. They look around and see lots of avenues to success. My wife’s two brothers struggled as students at mainstream colleges and both have made wonderful full lives, one as a salesman, the other as a builder. Each found his own best path. Each knows excellence.

The positional arms race to get into Harvard and the seventy-four other claimants to top forty status might be driven, in part, by a narrow focus on the part of applicants. That same phenomenon is reducing the chance of admission into the University of Illinois, and the University of Wisconsin's Coasties are a revenue source that is crowding out some of the locals.

But again, that excess demand is an opportunity for all institutions of higher learning to tighten standards and strengthen the curriculum. But where there is excess demand, the market-clearing price rises. That fundamental principle renders a recent College Affordability proposal incoherent.

Incentizing tuition restraint. I tend to be lukewarm towards tuition caps, a form of price controls. However, when many colleges restrict supply through selective admissions, the shortages that arise from price controls already exist before the caps are in place, and also government already is messing up markets for higher ed in other ways, meaning tuition caps are not as clearly bad as they might otherwise be. One approach that is not a pure tuition cap approach is to tie state assistance to the amount of tuition increase. For example, give a school a 5 percent increase in subsidy payments if it keeps tuition increases to two percent or less, and 3 percent increase for tuition increases between 2 and 4 percent, a 1 percent increase for tuition hikes of 4 to 6 percent, and no subsidy increase for hikes of greater than 6 percent.

The argument presupposes that tuition increases, particularly at state-subsidized colleges, are unreasonable per se. The ratings-driven excess-demand-generating below-equilibrium tuitions at the private universities shift some applicants to state universities, implying a ceteris paribus increase in the selectivity rankings there and perhaps an incentive for administrators to resist raising their tuitions and fees so as to further enhance their selectivity rankings.

I propose an alternative: contain costs by tightening admission standards, hiving off the swarms of functionaries whose primary objective is to "retain" individuals who do not measure up to the standards, and support the faculty in maintaining academic standards and enforcing academic integrity.

(New York Times article via Newmark's Door.)