THERE'S REALLY TOO LITTLE COMPETITION.

Higher education's spinmeisters rally around the narrative that trustees at the University of Spoiled Children and elsewhere who bought access to the rich and famous is reason to double down on faux-egalitarianism.  Start with John Warner in his "Just Visiting" page on Inside Higher Ed.

Competition is bad for education, bad for learning, bad for students, bad, ultimately, for educational institutions as well.

Competition is wasteful and inefficient, and leads institutions to engage in deliberately obstructive practices to hide the trust [c.q] cost of attendance to students.

Competition has squeezed poorer students not just out of admission at elite private universities, but public flagships as well, as demonstrated by a report from New America Education.

Students competing for scarce slots in magnet schools or college feeders experience increased stress and anxiety. Even the winners are losing.

I’m thinking about an even larger class of those who are harmed. How about black and brown children who are subjected to emotionally abusive practices at so-called “no excuses” charter schools so they may fare better in an admissions competition that will always be stacked against them?

All the ills that Mr Warner lays off on competition are actually evidence of the absence of competition.  Competition is the discovery of improvements in the way of doing things.  That's most commonly understood as market competition with the introduction of new products and technologies and finding more creative ways of using resources.  There is also competition among jurisdictions to provide bundles of amenities that voters will support with their taxes, and governance structures more generally understood also emerge in a form of competition.

Why does nobody pay list price, and why do the recruiters mislead students and parents about what they might be on the hook for?  Might the presence of third-party money in the form of grants or loans or quasi-scholarships pay a role?  In classical political economy, competition is the outcome of arms-length transactions between parties spending their own money, with some pretty good information about who the alternative sellers or buyers are.

Why are the state flagship universities filling up with students who might otherwise have enrolled at the Ivies and the fanciest small college?  Might it be that the kind of entrepreneurial awareness that expands choices in orange juice or computer tablets (or test-prep coaching?) doesn't work when it comes to expanding capacity in higher ed itself?  (A fun aside: the chief operating officer at Wisconsin-Milwaukee quipped this morning that none of Wisconsin's state colleges and universities got caught up in this investigation.  That despite the increased interest among upscale coastal types in Madison turning Milwaukee into the campus with the most state residents enrolled.)

Might it also be that the expanding upper middle class (are there now more millionaires in the United States than there are people in Sweden?) manifests itself in excess demand for spots in the Ivies, or Michigan, or Wisconsin, or, horrible dictu, at the University of Spoiled Children and its neighbor in Westwood?  With the reluctance of the Ivies to expand their classes, or stingy legislatures not funding expansion at the state flagships, or the people running higher ed doubling down on boutique multiculturalism, is anyone surprised that a positional arms race follows?

I'll leave it to others to sort out whether that "black and brown children who are subjected to emotionally abusive practices" isn't implicitly about what we used to speak of as "culture of poverty."

Mr Warner offers some constructive suggestions, to which I'll return anon.  First, though, let's enjoy "If selective colleges were less selective, there would be less incentive to cheat to get in." The Atlantic gave somebody named Adam Harris a platform to explain.  He starts in a logical enough way, recognizing the positional arms race.

College seats, overall, aren’t scarce by any means, but seats at selective institutions are—and purposely so. Institutions typically argue that keeping a steady, reasonably sized enrollment allows them to maintain high-quality services for students: student-teacher interaction, tutoring, and a vibrant campus culture. But scarcity has the added benefit of increasing an institution’s prestige. The more students who apply, and the fewer students who get in, the more selective an institution becomes, and, subsequently, the more prestigious. And parents are clawing over one another to get a taste of the social capital that comes with that.

That's exactly the Cold Spring Shops argument. But where we contend that the way to compete is for the state flagships to spend some money on strengthening their faculties generally, and for the regional comprehensives and the mid-majors to strengthen programs that might already have a decent profile (think Northern Illinois and Western Illinois jockeying for the highest pass rate on the Illinois C.P.A. exam), what Mr Harris wants to do is to take out the competition by ... well, words fail me.

The simplest way would likely be for selective institutions to stop being so selective and enroll more students. Instead of carefully crafting admitted classes—taking a little bit of diversity and a little bit of athleticism and a little bit of legacy and mixing them into the ideal freshman stew—institutions could open their doors and serve more students, Julie Posselt, an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education, told me. (Though USC was mentioned in the suit, Posselt was unconnected to the scandal.) Selective institutions would undoubtedly take a “prestige hit” because of that, but it could alter the way parents think about college: not as social capital to be bought, but as an opportunity for learning and growth.

I doubt it. Harvard indistinguishable from Massachusetts-Boston? And parents and employers won't recognize it?

If something doesn’t change, things are likely to get worse. “The population only continues to grow. Demand for these elite schools only accelerates,” [Arizona State president Michael] Crow said. And currently, [Southern California education professor Julie] Posselt said, there is an incredible incentive to get into a selective institution—to purchase that elite credential: The labor market rewards it. “The prestige factor won’t go away until the labor market stops rewarding it.” But perhaps colleges could preempt the labor market. If elite schools enrolled more students and forfeited some prestige, maybe there wouldn’t be such angst about who does or doesn’t get into any one in particular.

Hang on, how do you stop the labor market from selecting for ability?  There might still be more corporate CEOs with Wisconsin degrees than with degrees from any one Ivy, and people attuned to the placement rates of their colleges and to the participation in their job fairs will twig to that.  In addition, there is a faculty labor market, and the Ivy that decides to go full-in on access will have entering classes that will discourage striving students and frustrate faculty.

Apparently, though, the people at Arizona State don't mind being a figure of fun in the case.

Arizona State, where Crow became president in 2002, is now a higher-education behemoth with more than 100,000 students enrolled on campus and online across the world. It was, notably, not the type of institution that these parents were trying to get their children into. In fact, one parent cited in the complaint even went as far as to ask for a “road map for success” to getting his daughter “into a school other than ASU!” Parents don’t need to use a “side door,” as William Rick Singer, a cooperating witness for the government, called it—legal or illegal—to get into an institution that is more accessible.

After I spoke with Crow, a spokesperson for Arizona State sent an email with the university’s comment on being mentioned so flippantly in the suit. “Some universities have decided the most important thing they can do is turn away deserving, qualified applicants just so they can seem more exclusive,” the spokesperson wrote. “That leads to perverse incentives and perverse actions, as we are witnessing unfold right now.”

There are likely strong departments at Arizona State, but somewhere their story isn't being told, perhaps because there's too much talk about access.  Thus, to call on another Atlantic story, this by Matthew Stewart, it's the people who haven't yet participated in the expanding upper middle class who are hard done by.

Meanwhile, the rest of America’s families haven’t got the time or money for the helicopter bills, they are much more likely to find themselves in single-parenting situations, and they have longer commutes from neighborhoods with less desirable schools. They are the ones who are counting on public schools to prepare their children for the future, and on colleges to give their children a chance to do good things. And they are the ones that this system, and the 9.9 percent, is shafting on an epic scale.

This case should open the eyes of the people who haven’t yet learned to use their families as weapons in their ongoing fight to maintain privilege. The core of the problem that emerges with rising inequality is that it makes everybody unreasonable. And it’s a very short step from unreasonable to flat-out immoral.

We don't have that unreasonableness when it comes to obtaining tablet computers, or dependable cars, or apples in March. The lesson: there's really too little competition in higher education.

The good news is, the options are there, if you but recognize them. Here's Town Hall columnist Laura Hollis.

I am not saying that people do not get the value for their tuition dollars spent. The vast majority of schools have to supplement tuition with tax revenues (for state schools) and development dollars; tuition does not begin cover all the expenses associated with running a college or university.

Nor am I saying that schools with a historical reputation for quality no longer deserve that reputation. Most administrators and faculty take their responsibilities to the public extremely seriously, as generations of successful graduates demonstrate.

What I am saying is that there are a lot more places to receive a truly excellent education and broad-based college experience than there used to be. The “Black Friday” clamor to get your kids into the handful of institutions that comprise the top 25 is absurd and unjustified.

Mr Warner echoes that argument.  "There are thousands of institutions like [his College of Charleston, S.C.] across the country, including our community colleges which are providing educational access for many students who are the least resourced. We should be working to make the path much smoother for those folks, and if it means taking elite privates down a peg or two in the process, consider it past due payment for services already rendered."

It's actually there for the taking, but it starts by recognizing that the community colleges and the regional comprehensives and the mid-majors are in the same business as the Ivies, and they ought emphasize the degree programs with good job and professional school placements and their honors programs and their opportunities for students to get out of their comfort zones simply by interacting with their classmates.