There probably isn't a unique best way to handle this. Which is why it's fortunate that even if you restrict your attention to the relatively small set of elite colleges and universities there are still a whole bunch of 'em. It seems to me that there's a set of defensible approaches to the issue (including no requirements whatsoever) and it's good for some colleges to adopt each of them. I worry that pressure on each individual school to strike the "correct" balance leads ultimately to a kind of bland uniform compromise that serves no good purpose.
If you don't restrict your attention to a small set of elite colleges, this argument breaks down. The vast majority of college students don't have the opportunity to choose from among many or even some elite schools. They attend a local public university or community college. So the choices universities make matter--most undergrads don't have the luxury of voting with their feet, or wallets.
Moreover, there really isn't a lot of diversity out there on this issue, a point made by a commenter on Matt's blog. Even among private colleges and selective universities, there's not a normal distribution of decision-making ranging from laissez faire to tightly prescriptive. The elective system as it stands has been unchanged and widely adopted for at least a half-century now.
Moreover, the need for colleges to make some choices here doesn't mean they should all make the same choices, or even the same choices for all their students. Far from it. It would be great if their were some real intellectual diversity and competition around questions of the undergraduate core curriculum, among and within universities. What we have now is sameness via near-universal lack of any meaningful decisions. There's a huge, reasonable middle ground here between flexibility and guidance. Universities just aren't interested in going there, because it would mean contentious fights with the faculty, and who needs that kind of grief?
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