ONLINE COLLEGE IS A TECHNOLOGY OF SOCIAL STRATIFICATION. As students return, University Diaries tells readers what going to college is about.

Above all, the university stages, every day, the life of the mind. In the classroom, it offers difficult and rewarding and disciplined inquiry as a possible model for one’s life. The university wants to seduce you into its world, wants to appeal to your seriousness.

Although your professors wish you well, they are not thinking, as they engage you in their classrooms, about what job you’re going to get when you graduate. They are thinking about lighting a fire under your ass about a certain subject matter. They scan your faces, they ask you leading questions, in order to see whether there’s any smoke coming out of you.

The post is a reaction to a Brian Fogarty column in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune about the alleged productivity gains of online college.

But the lure of quick and easy education is no more realistic than the promise of quick weight loss without dieting or exercise. And, by the way, it won't be available for $199.

Indeed not. Too many college administrators, and more than a few faculty members, however, think the promise is there.

Pressures to reduce operating costs have led to increased online offerings from institutions of all types, but especially from for-profit corporations that aggressively market quick degrees, often including sizable online components. And as reported this month in the journal Academe, the established nonprofit colleges -- public and private -- are being forced into competition with the fast-degree industry. Their response has been to adopt a corporate-style business model: On the one hand, cut costs by increasing class sizes and hiring more part-time faculty; on the other, grow and diversify in order to weather ups and downs in the supply of new students.

To do so is a mistake, as Mitch Pearlstein, in the same newspaper, argues.

How many of you would be pleased if your son or daughter chose not to enroll in a four-year institution of higher learning but opted instead for the kind of place that advertises on cable at 2 a.m.?

Actually, the question needs to be aimed at more-affluent parents, upper-middle-income and above. How many of you would be happy -- honestly happy -- if your child bypassed St. Olaf, the University of Minnesota or St. Cloud State in order to attend what some might describe as a trade school?

I will be pleased to see if somebody else ends up making the case that there's excess demand for genuine higher education.

If reasonably well-to-do families have little interest in having their children forget about the "academy," the only way such enrollments could fall would be if the sons and daughters of less-financially fortunate (and therefore disproportionately minority) mothers and fathers chose to go elsewhere, if they opted to continue their formal educations at all.

The responsibility, rather, is on the common schools to serve their charges in such a way that promising youngsters, no matter their background, have the preparation for serious universities, for the universities to enroll students with the expectation that they will do serious work, and for trustees and legislatures to encourage their universities to pursue that course. It's unsound public policy to fob off unprepared students with phony degrees; it's unsound academic policy to dilute the curriculum and call it access.

A further and more sensitive (read: hazardous) line of thinking has to do with whether only 10 or 20 percent or so of Americans are intellectually equipped to do truly rigorous and legitimate college work in the first place.

This is not as antediluvian or nasty a contention as it might sound, given that only somewhat more than a third of Americans ever wind up completing four-year degrees -- and of wildly varying quality. It's also a view given a share of credence by the immense numbers of incoming freshmen in need of remedial work in the very basics of reading, writing and mathematics -- or, in many instances, arithmetic.

Charles Murray's Real Education, reviewed here, is the strong form of the intellectual-equipment argument; see also this review and reaction, and related commentary here, here, or here. What's left unsaid in Mr Pearlstein's column is what's most important.

College is not for everyone, but more than high school needs to be -- though the fact that fewer than three-quarters of all American kids currently finish high school on time is correctly understood as another profoundly incapacitating problem.

Strictly and coolly analytically, I agree with critics who contend that universities and four-year colleges are oversubscribed, for no other reason than that much of what passes for college-level work doesn't meet that standard.

Perhaps the simplest solution is to require today's high schools to do what the college-preparatory track of high school used to do. Here's me, four summers ago.

Perhaps the most salutary reform the public universities could obtain would be to announce something like "Effective 15 April 2007, admission to Enormous State University (flagship, land-grant, compass-direction alike) is contingent on passing the mathematics and writing placement tests. Enormous will no longer offer no-credit remedial mathematics, writing, and speaking courses for high school graduates who have not really received a high school education. Furthermore, Enormous State's Office of Institutional Research will report placement test passage rates by school district."

Two summers ago.

I crossed the Potomac into this Wilderness three years ago. I have seen no evidence since then that would persuade me to back off.

February 2009.

In The America That Worked^(TM), the common schools understood their mission to include preparing informed citizens and inculcating the habits of the upper middle class. Yes, that America was more sanguine about young people who didn't develop those habits opting out. On the other hand, forty years of enabling fecklessness and calling it inclusion puts us in a position where a respected public policy shop is calling for federal money to make community colleges more effective at doing what the high schools used to do as a matter of course. Perhaps the liquidity constraint that is going to bite on the government will encourage policymakers to look at restoring the older order, for lack of resources.

Last summer:

I'll endorse these propositions: higher education ought to be higher, and high schools ought do their work properly in order that colleges and universities don't have to redo it.

I hope to be able to put up a post with a title like "Somebody In Authority Sees it the Same Way." Otherwise, I'll keep battling.