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fyi below is the entire text - I didn't think the stories on the Editorial Page were behind the paywall. Apologies...

How to Save American Colleges

The Purdue president on freezing tuition, how to reduce student debt, and busting the accreditation cartel.

By Kate Bachelder
April 24, 2015 6:17 p.m. ET
West Lafayette, Ind.

With acceptance letters in hand, millions of high-schools seniors ruminating over where to attend college—and their parents who are panicked that their kid might pick the place with the best climbing wall—should all take a breath: It doesn’t much matter where you go to college.

What matters is “how you go,” says Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana. He then lays out the results of the Gallup-Purdue Index, a national survey of 30,000 college graduates that was first released last year. The survey attempts to quantify not only what graduates earn but also how well they are navigating adult life.

A mere 39% of college graduates report feeling engaged with their work, and in that group as many hail from top-100 schools as don’t. The three most important contributions that college makes to a sense of workplace thriving after graduation: Having one professor who made you excited about learning, feeling as though teachers cared about you, and working with a mentor. Graduates who checked those boxes were more than twice as likely to sense they are flourishing at work.
But only 14% of those surveyed said they had hit that trifecta in college. Other positive factors from undergraduate experience: working on a long-term project, having an internship and participating in extracurricular activities. Where graduates went to college barely registered as a predictor of job satisfaction.

Mr. Daniels spearheaded the research, and his penchant for data mining is one reminder that he is a former White House budget director. His mantra is “higher education at the highest proven value,” and more than once during our conversation in his office at Purdue he refers to Joseph Schumpeter, the economist who popularized the concept of “creative destruction.” Mr. Daniels also offers a quick economics tutorial about “Giffen goods,” products for which demand grows even as their price increases—like, say, a college education today.

His office is a corner room that is capacious without being grand, reflecting a college administrator who has set out with a single-minded focus on cutting costs, taming the tuition monster, and increasing the quality and value of college degrees. The most notable decorations are his Bundy duck decoys and a photo commemorating the time he rode his motorcycle, a Harley-Davidson, across the football field during a halftime show as the school’s marching band spelled out “MITCH.”

That was two years ago, soon after Mr. Daniels arrived at Purdue. His first order of business: freeze tuition.

“I had a sense, first of all, it seemed like the right thing to do. Not to skip over that. But secondly that we probably could do it without great difficulty,” he says. For decades college tuition has outpaced inflation, forcing students to increase their borrowing, but next year’s Purdue seniors will have never seen a tuition increase.
“I thought this whole process—it’s sort of like a bubble, and people are using that term—just couldn’t go on much further, and so why not get off the escalator before it broke,” he says.

Not many colleges have followed, and Mr. Daniels has a few theories about why. “Corporate boards 15 years ago or so were roundly and rightly criticized for being too compliant with the desires of management. If this was true of corporate boards, I think it’s really been true of a lot of college boards and trustees,” he says. “They have such an affection for dear old alma mater, love those 50-yard-line seats, ‘Whatever you want to do, Mr. President.’ And so it’s been observed a long time that colleges will spend everything they can get their hands on, in the absence of either market pressure or stewardship by a strong-minded board.”

There is also what he considers an “insidious” idea that “if we don’t raise our price, people will think we don’t have confidence in our product.” He points out that “in the absence of proof, people assume a higher price must be a better product or education.” But according to data released last year, half of high-school seniors accepted by their first-choice college attended a different school, and most cited cost as the reason.

The jig is about up. “I don’t know what the rate of the shake out will be, but you can already see the front edges,” Mr. Daniels says, referring to colleges that have begun shutting down. “A year or two ago, it was schools you hadn’t even heard of. This year it was Sweet Briar,” he says, of the 114-year-old Virginia women’s college that announced last month it is closing because of “insurmountable financial challenges.”

Mr. Daniels notes: “The top 10 endowments have something like a third of all the money, and the top 40 have two thirds or close to it. If you’re outside that group, and you’re charging these tuitions, I hope you’ve got a Plan B.”
Mr. Daniels lists what he has discovered are the top concerns of Purdue students—the cost of tuition, the price of room and board and textbooks—and seems to be working his way down that list, including nitty-gritty projects like reducing the cost of the meal plan by 5%. The college has deputized 18 loan counselors to warn students about borrowing too much; in the past two years, total debt has dropped $40 million. Amazon approached Mr. Daniels—ostensibly because the company sees him as an innovator—and worked out a deal to supply students with discount textbooks.

Mr. Daniels has also set out to measure what Purdue students are learning. More than 35% of college students at a range of four-year institutions showed no growth between freshman year and commencement in areas like critical thinking and writing, according to research by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in their 2011 book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” a work Mr. Daniels keeps on his bookshelf. Similar findings emerged from a 2005 Education Department report that found more than half of four-year college graduates could not compare viewpoints in newspaper editorials.