Inside the higher ed lobby: welcome to One Dupont Circle, where good education-reform ideas go to die.

• Author: Adler, Ben
• Position: OUR THIRD ANNUAL COLLEGE GUIDE - Higher education

In 2003, Ted Kennedy tried to nudge America's colleges and universities toward changing two of the least defensible practices in the modern admissions process. The first is legacy preferences, in which schools heavily favor applications from the children of alumni, often ahead of students with stronger academic resumes but less-well-connected parents. The second practice, early decision, where schools make it easier for prospective students to get admitted if they'll commit to attending at the time they apply, has a similar effect, since wealthier candidates don't need to compare financial aid packages and can therefore more easily commit to a school early. Taken together, the two practices fly in the face of the ideal of American meritocracy, and reduce the opportunities for young people of more modest backgrounds to go to selective colleges.

Under Kennedy's proposal, schools that used both tools and also graduated students of color at a disproportionately low rate--at the time, that meant eighty-seven schools, including five Ivies--would be required to try to boost that rate, and would receive federal money to do so. If they failed, the schools would be required to give up legacy preferences or early decision, or else forgo other forms of federal aid.

Kennedy was touching the third and fourth rails of higher education, a particularly courageous move for a senator who represents the state with perhaps the most powerful colleges in the country. Yet as a longtime leader on education issues, who two years earlier had worked with President Bush to pass the No Child Left Behind Act, Kennedy had sufficient clout to get his measure considered, even in a GOP Congress. Indeed, the proposal held out some appeal to certain of the Senate's Republican populists, who tend to be well disposed toward any effort to stick it to the East Coast elite.

But before Kennedy's proposal could even be formally introduced, One Dupont Circle weighed in. That's the address of the marble-and-glass office building that serves as the de facto headquarters for the array of groups representing the organized interests of America's colleges and universities. Prominently located in a fashionable D.C. neighborhood that's home to many of the better-funded nonprofits, One Dupont (or the "National Center for Higher Education," as its awning appropriately proclaims) is owned by the largest and most powerful of the higher ed associations, the American Council on Education. In order to facilitate coordination of policy and strategy, ACE leases the rest of the space, at below-market rates, exclusively to other higher ed groups (from the National Association of College and University Attorneys to the American College Personnel Association). That sense of cohesion tends to come through in the lobby's work: one higher ed expert I spoke to called One Dupont "a building that speaks, like the White House."

When the denizens of One Dupont learned of the Kennedy proposal, they pulled out all the stops to fight it. Legacy preferences are a key way for many colleges to maintain favor with deep-pocketed alumni, and early decision allows them to manage the admissions process with more predictability, and to lock in certain coveted applicants--often wealthy athletic recruits, who play sports like squash and lacrosse and whose parents can be expected to pay full price.

Higher ed lobbyists quickly mobilized their member colleges, encouraging them to go directly to senators on the key committee. Publicly, the lobby stressed the effect the measure would have on small religious institutions and historically black colleges, some of which, they claimed, depend for their existence on using the admissions process to maintain alumni loyalty. But in reality, say Hill staffers who worked on the issue, it was the elite New England private colleges and universities, appealing directly to their home-state senators Kennedy and Chris Dodd of Connecticut, who applied particularly effective behind-the-scenes pressure. When Dodd began to waver, Kennedy was forced to back off, and the two instead proposed a largely toothless alternative that merely required colleges to report on the number, socioeconomic status, and race of students who were relatives of alumni or were admitted through early decision. It involved no penalties of any kind. Yet ultimately, under pressure from One Dupont, even this measure was never brought up for a vote.

The fight to hold on to preferential admissions practices was only one example of what might be called the higher education lobby's misplaced priorities. For years, colleges and universities have hidden behind the argument that America's system of higher education is the best in the world to insulate themselves from scrutiny and accountability, and to operate with a remarkable degree of autonomy from Washington, given the funds lavished on them by the federal government. The claim that our higher ed system really is the best in the world, however, is becoming less and less true every year. In 1980, the United States led Canada by l0 percent in the percentage of its population with a college degree, and was ahead of the United Kingdom by 11 percent and France by 19 percent, according to a recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. By 2000, those leads had shrunk to 3, 6, and 10 percent respectively--and the evidence suggests that the gaps have continued to narrow since then. Meanwhile, colleges, especially elite private institutions, have been raising tuition far faster than the rate of inflation year after year after year, outpacing the meager growth in federal tuition subsidies. That's put a squeeze on middleclass families and forced students deeper and deeper into debt. Worst of all, the information that policy makers and the public need to begin turning these problems around--which schools are educating their students effectively, and how tuition dollars are really being spent--remains locked in the ivory tower.

That's not to say that higher ed doesn't champion righteous causes. In the 1990s, they stood up to attempts by the Republican Congress to cut student aid, and went on to team with the Clinton administration to expand the Pell Grant program. And when, after 9/11, the Bush administration, in its zeal to keep out terrorists, imposed...