WHY IT MATTERS. I repeat, as I must: higher education must be higher, and the land-grants and the mid-majors must be more like the Ivies and less like the diploma mills. Consider, first, a Neal Gabler column in the Boston Globe. Here's his gloomy conclusion.

So here’s the bottom line for all those exceptional middle-class and lower-class high school seniors who will doubt their own worth when the near-inevitable rejection letters arrive [from the top of the food chain]: The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in you. The fault lies in the system, and the system isn’t going to change, because it benefits the people it is designed to benefit - people who understand how much a real meritocracy would threaten their power.

On the one hand, get everything you can out of the university that accepts you, whether it's Wisconsin or Northern Illinois or even ZooMass or ZooConn. On the other hand, understand this: the power of that Establishment is circumscribed by the tendency of complex systems to behave as complex systems do.

Mr Gabler's column was picked up by Minding the Campus, where Charlotte Allen suggests that the for-profit diploma mills the mid-majors and regional comprehensives see as a competitive threat exist only to suckle on government financial aid.

For-profit schools can offer genuine value: classes tailored to students' work schedules, merciful freedom from the political-correctness indoctrination that is a feature of much nonprofit education. But if they had to earn their income from their students' own hard-earned money, they might have the incentive to do much more. They might consider packaging rigorous, top-quality, efficiently delivered instructional units that would guarantee the competence of anyone who passed those courses. How about preparing accountants to pass the CPA exam? Turning out crackerjack electricians and computer guys? Developing an online calculus course so good that students at the Ivies would buy it? The current federal slush-fund system for financing higher education rewards filling classrooms with bodies and wasting unqualified young people's time. For-profit colleges will come into their own only when their focus shifts from boosting enrollment to making their degrees items of value. Then, enrollment will take care of itself.

Maybe. When it comes to producing CPAs and computer guys, Northern Illinois does that. Online calculus? It's really better done with audience participation, I don't care where.

I'd be more optimistic if I didn't fear that traditional higher education exists more to convert federal financial aid dollars into cash for beer 'n circus.