HIGHER EDUCATION'S SUBPRIME SECTOR. Abraham H. Miller asks, "Are American Universities Going the Way of General Motors?" Little by little, we approach "Somebody in Authority Sees It the Same Way". Remember the formula: access, assessment, remediation, retention.

The American universities, or at least a number of departments within them, became like GM long before GM became like GM.

Preach it, brother.

We are reminded of the university’s strong and unwavering — administrators love using a word and its synonym together — commitment to retention. Retention? Yes, retention. You don’t need a college degree to get the message.

The essay wanders into familiar Culture Wars territory -- the area studies departments and the diversity requirements damage the intellectual integrity. The following, however, is uncomfortably close to the truth.

With greater demand for statistical outcomes from a pool of students that brings to the educational process lesser intellectual and motivational material and from students who have to work longer hours to meet expenses, education becomes transformed into a bean-counting ritual. We still know how to grant degrees, but in many fields education has become so bureaucratized that we have forgotten what the goal of an education is.

And there is a market test.

More than half of all Silicon Valley start-ups were the results of the creative power of immigrants. Draining the intellectual power of the rest of the world has worked well for us. But when these students find educational and economic opportunities closer to home, there will be a profoundly negative impact on our higher education system. Some of these students might find that having to fulfill a cultural requirement with a class in “the lesser lesbian poets” is a sufficient enough turnoff to think about educational opportunities elsewhere.

More to the point, when these students discover that the vaunted degree program they signed up for has been made less rigorous, for whatever reason, they will consider those opportunities.