THE POTENTIAL ENTRANTS ARE ALREADY THERE.

David Kirp suggests that the U.S. News-favored institutions clone themselves.  "Harvard-San Diego, Yale-Houston — this idea is not simply off the table in academe."  The onus really ought be on the University of California at San Diego to run with this -- they have the geographic location going for them, and without the sports impedimenta of the Los Angeles or Berkeley; or in Houston the University of Houston, already with some sports visibility, or Rice, which is not without some chops already, to take up the challenge.  Mr Kirp might even recognize the opportunity.

Most enterprises where demand far outstrips supply would seize the opportunity to expand. A handful of public universities like Arizona State have done precisely that. Last fall, Arizona State enrolled more than 128,000 undergraduate and graduate students at campuses across the state and online. Even as Arizona State has become bigger and more egalitarian — the number of undergraduates from low-income families has increased nearly 300 percent since 2002 — it has also gotten better. The percentage of students who earn a bachelor’s degree has climbed to 69 percent, well above the national average.

Look, I'm going to keep making the same argument until somebody convinces me I'm wrong. The Arizona States and the land-grants and the mid-majors and maybe even the California flagships keep messing up the value proposition. Matt "Dean Dad" Reed might take issue with my use of the expression, "value proposition," but, scoop, there it is.

If high tuition were truly driving students away, then we would have seen massive enrollment drops at the most expensive places and massive enrollment increases at the least expensive. Instead, we’re seeing application booms at exclusive places and community colleges taking the biggest hits on enrollment. The expensive places are attracting more people, and the affordable ones are attracting fewer. That’s a story in itself, but it’s not a story of colleges pricing themselves out of the market.

The story there isn’t of tuition spirals, out-of-touch academics or any of the usual suspects. It’s a story of wealth polarization. The wealthiest institutions are becoming more so, and everyone else is struggling. Ultimately, that’s not really a story about colleges; it’s really a story about the larger economy and the political choices underlying it. The fear that high school students express about employability are not mostly about tuition; they’re about an increasingly winner-take-all job market. As Tressie McMillan Cottom put it in Lower Ed, prestige degrees serve as a sort of negative social insurance. They provide the prospect of protection against economic free fall.

That also says something about more people getting richer, and about the laggards in the U.S. News league tables not lifting their game, doesn't it?  "Credentialism, along with the exponential growth of higher education bureaucracy, have perpetuated an expensive system that often fails to prepare students for the workforce."  That's not a good place for either the industry or the potential clientele to be.  Buy a prestige degree, maybe you're good enough; or maybe you're no better than the person who got the less well-regarded degree, apart from having paid more to find out.  The excess demand for the signal is still there, but signals can be produced relatively cheaply.