The president of Dartmouth College recently asked in the Wall Street Journal, “Is a Four-Year Degree Worth It?” She states that colleges will have to change their ways to win back the confidence of students and parents. She’s right—but only about the problem.

Dartmouth’s president, Sian Beilock, identifies the symptoms clearly enough—eroding trust, runaway costs, ideological overreach—and proposes a series of remedies: expanded financial aid, stronger career pathways, and institutional neutrality. These are reasonable as far as they go. The problem is that they don’t go far enough. Not even close.

The structural drivers of the college affordability crisis are not mysterious. Faculty senates protect minimal teaching loads. Administrative headcounts have ballooned for decades. And the four-year degree timeline—that most sacred of academic traditions—has gone essentially unquestioned. These are the things making college expensive, and they are the things no university president seems willing to touch.

The deeper assumption behind Beilock’s proposals is that a public mea culpa, a few cost tweaks at the margins—the University of Chicago, for instance, cut student funds to subsidize faculty raises—and a favorable political cycle will restore the status quo. It won’t. (Read UChicago’s Self-Made Crisis).

The harder admission—one no university president seems willing to make—is that nearly everything a university does can be done in half the time for half the cost. If they are serious about saving their institutions, that is where the conversation has to start. So what Beilock really needs to be asking is: why does a degree take four years? Why does it cost this much? Why does the institution employ this many administrators? And why does it demand this little of its faculty?

The “Oxbridge” model still resonates strongly in university culture, especially at schools like Dartmouth. It indeed produced many outstanding scholars and graduates, but there is no demonstrated correlation between those models and subsequent measurements of human productivity or total life-cycle learning—merely an assumed one. As Oliver Wendell Holmes once told a Harvard class, “You cannot make a master by teaching. He makes himself by aid of his natural gifts.”

Colleges and universities in the U.S. largely rest on the Oxbridge tradition, but we made major changes to them—especially by creating a corporate university system with sprawling staff, high wages, and huge fixed costs, and with an enormous level of competition that legacy British and European institutions never faced. With twenty-first century realities bearing down, they all struggle to adapt.

Today’s students are also very different and far more varied, and there are millions more of them, taught in a mass-production system of lectures rather than in small tutorials. The underlying production function of modern higher education doesn’t favor elite colleges operating a first-class airline without sufficient first-class paying passengers—and with banks, donors, and taxpayers increasingly unwilling to subsidize them. That means some big structural adjustments are unavoidable.

Moreover, university professors and administrators have gradually come to expect that they can emulate corporate or even venture-capital financial rewards, without the associated risks. As a result, the college and university operating model has become decoupled from its economic and social logic and from the revenue base it relies on. If they want to be businessmen, then the first task of a university administrator is to run their business like a business—or submit to effective nationalization and wage-price controls.

The funny thing, however, is that colleges and universities are already effectively nationalized. On any given working day, administrators constantly deal with government regulations and compliance, and bank on government grants and federally underwritten student tuition loans. They expend enormous energy currying favor with politicians and donors alike, seeking to be sheltered as a presumptive public good while chasing private-level rewards. When that disjunction occurs, a choice has to be made.

The Dartmouth president, if she is actually going to decrease costs, needs to cut professor salaries and benefits—including her own—by half; cut bloated administrative headcount by the same amount; double professor teaching loads; and accelerate degrees so they can be completed in half the time. And she needs to move fast because there are nearly 6,000 colleges and universities in the U.S., including two-year colleges that deliver nearly the same or more value for a fraction of the cost. 

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign charges one-third of Dartmouth’s tuition and outranks it in several key departments. The “public ivy” University of Texas at Austin charges one-fifth as much—and holds the highest-ranked petroleum engineering program in the country, a vital skill in the global oil economy. Dartmouth, Yale, Harvard, and Columbia, on the other hand, wouldn’t generally distinguish an oil field from a wind farm—and their contempt for military science and hostility to ROTC programs helps explain why the Department of Defense recently severed ties with Harvard and Columbia.

So to answer the Dartmouth president’s question: a four-year degree is worth the present value of its expected future earnings. But as with all discount rate calculations, that value improves dramatically through efficiency—lower direct costs and faster realized income. The prescription is straightforward: get in and out as fast as possible, at the lowest investment cost, with minimal debt, and return to work and earnings sooner. But college must also be compared against alternatives: junior college, the military, apprenticeships, foreign programs, or serious vocational tracks that may make further academic investment unnecessary. The United Kingdom offers a three-year undergraduate law degree leading to the professional LL.B, cutting the inflated U.S. J.D. track by more than half. In that light, college can become avoidable.

College and university presidents who claim to want reform rarely reckon with what genuine structural change would actually demand of them personally. Like alcoholics, they can admit to having a problem—but recidivism is the great temptation, especially when that bottle of academic privilege is free, paid for by an uncritical government and uninformed students, families, and taxpayers.