Pearlstein is Right

Steven Pearlstein, that is, the Washington Post business columnist. You can learn most of what you need to know about why higher education costs so much and what to do about it by reading his two columns on the subject this week (here and here). Today's piece focuses on University of Maryland Chancellor Brit Kerwan:

Kirwan's singular achievement has been to fundamentally change the mind-set on campus, from one that reflexively equated spending with quality to one that is open to measuring inputs and outputs and welcomes the challenge of delivering more for less.

Anyone can now go to the University of Maryland Web site, for example, and call up a report on how each campus, and the system as a whole, is performing on 31 measures, such as acceptance and graduation rates, average faculty salaries and the percentage of operating expenditures going for administration and instruction.

A funny thing happens when you start collecting and publicizing data like these: They expose inefficiencies and get people thinking about how to do things differently. After reviewing the comparative data, for example, Maryland regents decided to concentrate growth on the campuses with the lowest costs.

And once it became apparent that low-income students were graduating with more debt than more well-off students, the university was forced to face up to the embarrassing fact that it was giving out 60 percent of its scholarship money on the basis of "merit" -- financial-aid-speak for using scholarships to buy higher SAT scores and winning athletic teams. The regents have decreed that much more of the aid will be awarded on the basis of financial need.

Higher ed needs more people like this.