MARKET TESTS. A USA Today editorialist understands that universities compete for students.

College presidents accurately say they are caught in a bind. If they don't have fancy gyms and near-gourmet food in the cafeterias, choosy students will enroll elsewhere. Plus, cutting back on per-pupil expenditures can hurt a college in some rankings.

The editorial starts with basketball parvenu Davidson College, where $43,000 an academic year includes laundry service. Presumably, other kinds of choosy students can shop around for less pricey options. I continue to wonder, however, whether the flight to amenities doesn't conceal a reluctance of students to expose themselves to the seamy side of access-assessment-remediation-retention.

There is also competition for faculty, which the columnist doesn't understand.

Colleges should value their professors for actually teaching classes. Even research universities can boost teaching loads to limit faculty size. University of Maryland Chancellor William Kirwan once responded to a budget crisis by increasing the faculty workload, an action considered both startling and brave. It should be normal.

I must investigate the faculty turnover at Maryland. One of the individuals recommended by a student for our graduate colloquium series recently moved from Maryland to Notre Dame. Although Maryland tends to score above Notre Dame in the economics hierarchy, and although one anecdote does not a trend make, there are limits to an administration's ability to change the job descriptions of its faculty, even when it's a hold-up of a faculty member who made the transaction-specific investment called "earning tenure". Valuing professors for teaching is not the same thing as increasing class sizes and scheduling them into more sections.