CREDENTIALS WITHIN CREDENTIALS? Newmark's Door links, and Invisible Adjunct comments at length, on Patrick Healy's feature on competition among name universities to land name professors who usually get ample administrative reassignment to do research, meaning the tasks of grading, and to some extent serving on committees, fall to others, often assistant professors chewed up and released without tenure, or adjuncts. (Healy commits the usual journalistic sin of focusing on Deirdre McCloskey's surgery rather than her work on the rhetoric of economics, but provides her rationale, "We want an urban public university with high standards for the great unwashed," which is substance to which I wish to speak.)

Invisible Adjunct's site provides link captures by which people can find links to her posts. Kind of cool. This Planned Obsolescence post is worth a look.

Returning to the substance, several ideas come to mind. First, McCloskey left Iowa for Illinois-Chicago. Iowa has been rather stingy with the academic side of its public universities in order to find a successor to Hayden Fry and build up the Cyclones to occasionally beat Hayden Fry's successor; I met two very good industrial economists in Taiwan who had recently left Iowa for Vanderbilt. Second, one has to wonder about the effectiveness of the star strategy. Given that the prestige colleges recruit their superstars with the inducement of additional research time and light committee work, and engage in grade inflation to boot, what value does a degree from a prestige college have anyway? (The signal loses its value if it doesn't help employers separate students.) Will transcripts have to give the names of the professors? Third, the phenomenon of recruiting star professors has elements of a positional arms race. Robert Frank and Philip Cook criticized these in The Winner-Take-All Society (usual details, it's also available in paperback.) Their thoughts (pp. 222-223 of the hard cover version) address part, but not all, of the problem:

"This competition is driven largely by the imperatives of the research agendas in the various disciplines. And there is no reason to suppose that the criteria by which, say, literary critics or economists score points in this competition are even loosely correlated with the interests of taxpayers.

"It is one thing for a state to recognize a public interest in ensuring that all citizens receive a solid primary and secondary education. A case can also be made for public support for higher education in the increasingly sophisticated skills required in the modern workplace. And, from the perspective of state governments at least, there is even a case for subsidizing elite education at the university level, lest the state's best students migrate to other states and thereby vanish from the local tax rolls. But it is far from clear that taxpayers should subsidize the competition for elite status across a broad range of disciplines in each of several separate state universities.

"Both efficiency and fairness favor a narrower and more focused pursuit of excellence. Those states that wish to maintain elite public institutions of higher learning would be well-advised to consider charging tuitions comparable to those charged by elite private institutions. Equity requires that a talented student not be denied access to the top institutions merely because of his or her family's inability to pay. But this goal can be served with need-based financial aid, rather than with across-the-board tuition subsidies, which largely benefit rich and upper-middle-income familiies.

"The case for tuition reform is clearest perhaps in the case of law schools. Although the country already has far more lawyers than could possibly be justified on efficiency grounds, most states continue to subsidize the production of still more lawers."

In 1995, when the book appeared, Professor Frank was at Cornell and Professor Cook at Duke. There are hints in Frank's writing that he began his research into positional arms races on a recruiting visit to Northwestern, when he discovered that he would be competing with private-sector upper managers for the kind of house in the kind of neighborhood he had become accustomed to in Ithaca. Leave that aside for a moment, and leave for another day the reality that state universities forever lament their brightest leaving the state for greener pastures. (Wisconsin exports degrees to flatlanders, and there's a large alumni club in Chicago, and a goodly number of economics Ph.D.s in Washington, D.C. During the recession of the earlly 1980s, the interesting women were all leaving Michigan, but I digress.) Their point on tuitions is spot-on: why should the state be in the business of picking winners? (John Lemon sees a way out of that dilemma incidental to solving affirmative action.) On the other hand, wouldn't higer tuitions mean more gains from trade to share with professors, which might attract even more potential superstars? See Frank and Cook's chaper 6, "Too Many Contestants," for a positive theory of the glut of humanities Ph.D.s.