GIVE US THAT OLD TIME RELIGION.  The Chronicle of Higher Education leaves a symposium outside the paywall, focusing on the clash of budget-cutting governors and embattled professors. Instapundit quips, "Note the defensive crouch".   And yes, a few of the usual Culture Warrior suspects participate, offering the usual stuff.  For instance, Yeshiva's Ellen Schrecker.

With higher education increasingly hard to pay for in the current economic crisis, it can no longer serve as a safety net for the middle class and a source of economic mobility for society. Nor, given the political attacks on academe, can our colleges maintain the intellectual excellence, diversity, and freedom that once made them the envy of the world.

Never mind the very real possibility that diversity crowded out intellectual excellence long ago, and publish-or-perish trammels inquiry in ways more corrosive than any spreadsheet-scanning, adjunct-hiring trustee can dream of, and the public has lost faith in higher education.

Texas's Daniel Hamermesh grounds his argument in reality, and recognizes tradeoffs.

In a sensible world, the cuts would be made disproportionately at the margins; colleges that have trouble attracting students, that are in remote areas, or that offer programs that duplicate their neighbors' superior efforts would bear the brunt of budget-cutting. Regrettably, financing of public higher education doesn't work that way. The cuts will be nearly across the board, since each local state representative wants to ensure that the local public college receives its "fair" share of public funds.

Cuts of this sort will hurt elite public universities in the short term. But they will meet the reductions without major cuts in quality. They will raise tuition more rapidly than otherwise and will do an even better job of building endowments, which is fine with me.

I'm not bothered by tuition increases for students who come from families with incomes exceeding $120,000 a year, as do half of the students at the University of Texas at Austin and probably at the other elite public campuses as well. Indeed, such increases are desirable—why should the average taxpayer continue to subsidize the children of the well-to-do so heavily?

Regular readers will recognize a regressive transfer argument in the preceding, but the abolition of some kinds of regressive transfers brings tradeoffs.

But the long-term impacts of the impending budget cuts will not be minor at the broad array of lower-tier public institutions that account for the larger part of this sector. Many of them cannot raise tuition without reducing demand and thus their ability to spread their fixed costs. And many do not have an alumni base that is likely to generate endowment donations big enough to substitute for public revenues. In the end, those colleges will instead get by with fewer programs and larger classes; with fewer tenure-stream faculty members and still more adjuncts and temporary faculty; and with less-up-to-date facilities.

Is this worrisome? After all, the gem of American higher education, its mixture of world-class frontier-level research with undergraduate and graduate education, will be maintained in the elite private and public research universities. So what if much of public higher education becomes increasingly vocationally oriented and is conducted on the cheap?

This reversion is the logical consequence of the now 40-year trend toward increasing inequality of income, a trend that in the past 15 years has been especially marked at the very upper tail of income distribution. The effects on higher education are no surprise, but they are disturbing. As higher education becomes a gated community for the offspring of the well-to-do, opportunity for others is reduced. The American ideal of upward mobility, perhaps our greatest contribution to the intellectual capital of mankind, is further diminished.

Worse, the opportunity for the diamond-in-the-rough student to become polished and to contribute world-class innovations that generate the technological leaps that benefit the entire society—and the human race—will diminish. Finally, by vocationalizing higher education for the masses—replacing education with training—we will increasingly fail to teach people to think.

Professor Hamermesh's concluding paragraph suggests the new separating equilibrium in higher education is being manipulated by the plutocracy.  Perhaps.  But the mid-majors and regional comprehensives are complicit in this sorting in a number of ways: treating the University of Phoenix and the online diploma mills, rather than the land-grants and state flagships as the competition to be emulated; associating first-generation and non-traditional enrollment with more vocational degree programs; admitting less-prepared people and calling it access.  But boy does that approach allow administrators to preen and posture about how inclusive they are, to the approbation of some politicians and some sycophants on the faculty.  Never mind that that approach equips no students with the keys to the gated community.