The college try.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note - American colleges and universities - Editorial

Every year the Washington Monthly devotes an entire issue to assessing America's colleges and universities. We do this because we believe they are key to the country's greatness. They produce the research and human capital that fuel the economy. They teach the habits of mind and spirit that undergird democracy. And they provide the means for upward mobility that is the bedrock justification for the American experiment.

It should come as no surprise, then, that higher education, like the country itself, is in deep trouble. Tuition--the price of admission to middle-class life--continues to rise far above the rate of inflation, as it has for years. At public colleges and universities, tuition hikes averaged nearly 8 percent this past academic year thanks to cash-strapped state governments slashing higher education budgets. Community colleges, unable to keep up with demand in a tight labor market, are capping enrollments and turning students away. For-profit schools have turned out to be better at earning profits and foisting unpayable debt burdens on their students than providing them with marketable credentials. And elite schools remain bastions of privilege, with twenty-five upper-income students for every low-income one. Though they've recently been trumpeting their eagerness to admit more poor and working-class students, an analysis by the Chronicle of Higher Education shows that the percentage of students on Pell Grants at the fifty best-endowed colleges and universities in the country hasn't budged since 2004. The United States, once first in the world in the percentage of its young adults with college degrees, is now tenth, and slipping.

Yes, it's depressing. But America has always had a knack for reinventing itself, and if you look hard, as we tried to do, you can find innovations in the higher education sector that could turn things around dramatically.

One of these is Western Governors University. A nonprofit online school founded by state governors a decade and a half ago, WGU caters to the same adult learners that for-profit colleges target. But while the for-profits' enrollments are plummeting and their business models collapsing in the face of relatively mild new federal consumer protections called "gainful employment" rules, WGU is thriving, reports John Gravois ("The College For-profits Should Fear," page 38), by offering its students "a college degree that is of greater demonstrable value than what its for-profit competitors...