Well-regarded nonprofit colleges are mostly doing the right thing, with some stat-gaming around things like number of student organizations, expenditure per stu

Well-regarded nonprofit colleges are mostly doing the right thing, with some stat-gaming around things like number of student organizations, expenditure per student, etc. to jockey for higher positions in U.S. News. Not in their core educational functions. We as hackers can tell that our $1,500 Macbook Pros are better than $450 Inspirons, so Apple thrives. The problem is that it is much more difficult to distinguish between high-quality and low-quality education. With vocational training it is easy: do employers like the graduates? Do they get hired at a substantially higher rate than non-graduates? Do they get paid more? But with education it is much, much harder. There are some objectively observable traits that can (sort of) tell you whether an environment is likely to contribute to certain kinds of personal intellectual growth: do students read and respond to (at least) the Western literary canon? Are classes small enough to facilitate meaningful discussion? Are a wide variety of courses taught? How deep into their respective fields to the syllabi go? Does the school actually own the equipment and materials necessary to perform the kinds of laboratory procedures that a graduate in the sciences should have experienced? Are the classes hard enough that not everyone gets perfect scores all the time? How many hours do students need to spend on the coursework to make good grades? But all of these can be gamed. Hire lots of cheap, incompetent professors. Have small group discussions where you basically just sit there for an hour talking about nothing and wasting time because the professor is doing something else on his laptop. Force students to write papers, but have an institutional culture where they are mostly bullshitted or plagarized and no one cares. Don't actually take the time to grade students' work, but assign bad grades to the handful of students least likely to make a fuss. Assign lots of busywork. Etc. Attract students with good high school test scores by lobbying to divert government funding that would have allowed them to attend better institutions, and set your own prices cheaper. Think of any other property of legitimately good education, someone can probably find a way to appear to have that property more efficiently than actually having it. The only reason this isn't widespread is because administrators are generally people who want to provide good education and have the freedom to spend pretty much whatever they can get their hands on to do so. If you replace them with administrators who want to serve shareholders instead of students, they will find ways to hit the metrics that actually influence reveneue (i.e. rankings) while spending less than the other guys, and that will probably mean compromising the quality of the education they provide.