LINEAR THOUGHT IS DESIRABLE. One of these things is not like the others.

Rising costs and tuition in American colleges cannot be addressed without also examining the rising demands being placed on our institutions. American universities are expected to do many things besides deliver classroom instruction, including offering residential life in buildings with the latest technology, producing new knowledge through research and supporting athletics on a major scale. All these correctly belong in American higher education, and all are subject to increasing demands from the public and from the academy itself.

Catch that Divine Passive? Who is expressing the expectations? Is it parents and students who would like to live in quarters that aren't LeCorbusier's nightmares? Premium services at premium prices, requested by clients. Is it students who would like to know the latest developments in the pricing of contingent claims? Perhaps somebody who has contributed to that work will be a more effective presenter of it than someone hired to read somebody else's notes. These two "expectations" are distinct from the third, and the demand for the third might be self-inflicted. (Northern Illinois has gone from attention by the BCS and a bowl victory to the Bottom Ten. The buzz from the attention allowed us to call attention to our academic efforts, which were in place long before the team's run and remain in place -- if headquarters and Springfield will let us -- at present.)

The column becomes less coherent.

To begin to equate cost and price would require a complete rethinking of what is necessary for an excellent undergraduate education in the U.S. Our model demands competition and the constant addition of new programs. Cost and tuition continue to escalate because of what is demanded by the public and higher education itself. Unlike a traditional business model, where competition lowers prices through factors such as economies of scale, in higher education, competition actually increases cost because new programs and buildings, fueled by a desire to provide “the best,” are expensive.

Right. Medical care would be cheaper in the absence of organ transplants, improved pharmaceuticals, or radiation therapy. But life expectancies would be shorter. The columnists miss an opportunity to consider a positional arms race, in which universities compete to offer inefficiently opulent amenities or inefficiently generous salaries and job descriptions, which might lead to higher costs and higher prices. I suspect, however, that as long as there is excess demand for perceived prestige degrees, there is a lot of upside potential in tuitions.

If we want to establish a correlation between cost savings and decreased tuition, and if we want to advance affordability, we must radically shift some longstanding expectations. Are universities willing, for example, to reduce their emphasis on faculty research, athletics, student-life services, the quality of physical campuses, smaller classes, study-abroad options and technology? Are there other strategies, such as programmatic cooperation among several institutions, to reduce costs? Or, will higher education reaffirm the point that there is a cost to providing a high quality, distinctively American college education?

Why not reaffirm that point? The columnists focus on the excess of symbolism over substance in a few overrated private institutions skimming a bit more of their endowments to lower prices to families in the 94th percentile of earnings. A tuition subsidy at a state university, whether disguised as a merit scholarship or not, is a regressive transfer. As long, however, as an earnings premium to a college degree exists, there is an incentive for the providers to seek some of the gains from that trade.