The current Obama proposal has problems, the suggested metrics (six-year graduation rate, tuition cost and employment after graduation) are problematic and too easily gamed.

Salaries are the biggest expense at a university, you can easily cut those by shifting to more adjuncts. With the shape the academic labour market is in, that is easily done. Quality of instruction drops, but the students don't mind, they are there for credentials, not for an education. What does suffer is the idea of a university.

Graduation rate is really problematic. You can fix that by watering down standards, again the students don't mind, it's more A's for everyone, they are there for credentials, but what you would really like to do is to admit more students and weed those out that can't hack it in their first year, before they are welded to the wrong career track.

As for employment after graduation, look no further than third-tier law schools with their legal clinics that employ their graduates. Such places need to be shut down today.

Instructors are not really that large of a budget item at collages. Administrative overhead has continued to grow due to a wide range of factors including such things as the new demand for IT at all schools.

Administrative overhead is growing, but you can't cut there - you need functional infrastructure. So you cut where you can, and that is at the teaching end.

By the way, part of the growing infrastructure is because universities are trying to attract non-traditional students, such as first-generation students, minorities and non-Western students. You can drop a middle-class US guy into a US university, and he will do just fine. But a minority student may need tutoring (because his high school plainly sucked), someone from China will need help with cultural adjustment, and a first-generation student may not even know how to study (his family is of no help). All this is motivated by the need for more bodies paying tuition.

Are you sure that admin overhead couldn't be cut? Does the president really need to make 7 figures?

University presidents are fundraisers and marketeers. I suspect the talent pool is small, there are not that many people with good connections to donors and proven ability to attract outside money. And the need for external funds is rising.

Here is a particularly lurid example, but the idea is the same everywhere: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/nyregion/a-quick-descent-f...

Administrative overhead is growing, but you can't cut there - you need functional infrastructure.

A college needs gardeners, programmers, network admins and secretaries; does it need Vice Presidents of Student Diversity and football coaches?

Football coaches pay for themselves.

As for vice presidents of student diversity, I think they get a bad rap. As college expands to include more than just the children of the rich, you need additional support infrastructure for students: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/who-gets-to-gr...

Or perhaps colleges simply need to stop admitting students without adequate preparation in the name of "diversity". I'm also uncertain what "diversity" has to do with "children of the rich". Maybe you could explain?

According to the article you link to, the "diverse" students have SAT scores 200 pts lower than average and perform even worse than that SAT gap would predict. It seems a bit unfair to charge students who study for exams extra money simply to pay for extra help to those who don't (e.g., "Vanessa" in the article you link to).

Here is the relevant statistic:

If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores. Take students like Vanessa, who do moderately well on standardized tests — scoring between 1,000 and 1,200 out of 1,600 on the SAT. If those students come from families in the top-income quartile, they have a 2 in 3 chance of graduating with a four-year degree. If they come from families in the bottom quartile, they have just a 1 in 6 chance of making it to graduation.

We're talking about students with similar SAT scores displaying dramatically different graduation outcomes based on parental income. The function of college, especially state colleges, isn't to reward people for being on the ball earlier in life, especially considering how much that has to do with parental education and income. It's to educate the populace, and enable upward mobility within society. It's penny-wise and pound-foolish to not spend money helping lower-income students graduate at the same rate as higher-income students with similar SAT scores. Every low-income student with above-average SAT scores that doesn't graduate college is a huge missed opportunity for the state to put a capable and educated person into the workforce.

The article suggests later on that Vanessa is atypical: To get a better sense of who these struggling students were, Laude started pulling records...almost all of them had low SAT scores — low for U.T., at least — often below 1,000 on a 1,600-point scale.

A 200-point difference in average SAT scores between the two sections (one of them being the "we won't call it remedial" section) is also discussed.

Also, take a look at why Vanessa needed help, at least as per the article's implication: "She failed her first test in statistics...At Mesquite High, she never had to study for math tests; she aced them all without really trying."

You also seem to believe that putting heroic efforts into teaching students thing will somehow help them become a capable worker. That might be true for a few rote fields - perhaps Vanessa's nursing career might be one of them [1]. But except for fields where college is mere rote training in procedures, that's not actually producing capable workers. When I hire, giving me a person who can only learn new things if I invest heroic effort and personal attention is useless - I need my employees to figure things out on their own.

[1] I know little about nursing - from the outside it appears fairly rote, but I'm open to being corrected on this

football programs only pay for themselves at a small number of universities, almost all subsidize them.

http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/Myth-College-Sports-Ar... http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/2013/05/07/ncaa...

You can cut a lot of fat from University administrative budgets. Just as an example outsource email. There are plenty of reasons this does not happen, but mostly it's a question of politics not cost savings.

The obvious solution here is to separate education from credentialing. Have the government create uniform credentialing standards and allow anyone to attempt to achieve them for a small fee - e.g., $250 to take the exam for "US Govt. English B.A.".

Quality of instruction drops...

How do you know this?

What does suffer is the idea of a university.

Why should anyone (besides people looking to become non-adjunct professors) care?

There are already accreditation groups such as ABET that review and score programs - http://www.abet.org/about-abet/ There's absolutely no reason to get the government into a system that already works.

I'm not sure hiring more adjuncts would hurt the quality of (undergraduate) teaching. In my own experience adjuncts were far more dedicated to teaching than tenured professors who focus on their research without caring how low their teaching ratings sink.

Doesn't this already exist, albeit in a private capacity, with things like the US News rankings?

The US News rankings have a lot of factors which can easily be gamed and/or probably aren't relevant to ranking an institution based on quality. One that comes to mind is including the "Easiness" factor from RateMyProfessor as a positive metric (easier schools are ranked more highly).

On a more philosophical level, having a private 3rd party control the decisions of our college-bound youth could become problematic. How likely is it that the US News rankings may have some sort of bias, anything from an analyst's alma mater being ranked higher to quid pro quo bribery? Hopefully, a public institution would be more robust in the face of these biases.

Whenever there are humans involved, there will be biases. Making it a government entity instead of a private entity doesn't change that. People are people.