Peter Berkowitz has written a new piece for Real Clear Politics which lays out some common sense reforms for American colleges and universities.

How to Improve Our Colleges and Universities

Our top-ranked arts colleges have raised fees to extraordinary heights. According to ACTA, “The ‘sticker price’ of higher education has risen 538 percent since 1985—compared to a ‘mere’ 286 percent increase in medical costs and a 121 percent increase in the consumer price index during the same time period.” At the top colleges (not including the three military service academies, which do not charge), annual tuition, room and board, and fees range from a low of $53, 318 at Grinnell to a high of $61,167 at Wesleyan. The median cost is above $58,000 per year.

The lowest cost exceeds the national annual median household income of $52,762.

Our top-ranked arts colleges have substantially increased administrative costs. More than half of the U.S. News Top 25 “increased administrative spending at a faster rate than instructional spending during the five year period ending in 2011-2012, the most recent year for which financial data are publicly available.” Meanwhile, “four schools—Davidson College, Grinnell College, Pomona College, and Scripps College—each increased administrative expenditures by at least 25 percent over five years, after adjusting for inflation.”

And our top-ranked liberal arts colleges have downgraded the faculty’s traditional mission of teaching undergraduates. They have reduced teaching loads while increasing incentives for professors to devote their hours outside of the classroom to research and scholarly publication rather than to discussing ideas with students.

To reverse the decline over which faculty and administration have presided, ACTA calls on trustees, donors, alumni, parents, and students to take action. In their different roles, they can begin by persuading all liberal arts colleges to publish data on their academic standards, including results of nationally normed tests of core collegiate skills, and grade distributions each semester in each department and program.

Liberal arts colleges should also be convinced of the need to reestablish a core curriculum that provides students with a common foundation including math, science, literature, principles of American politics, U.S. history, economics, religion, foreign languages, and world civilizations.