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As I think about it, public institutions which are trying to compete their way to prosperity are a lot like the kids who were striving to get into the elite schools, but whose paths were blocked by the rich kids taking the side door via parental bribes.
The public institutions are buying into a system which is inherently rigged against them. There is no winning in trying to join the elite, there is only the increased cost of trying to compete, but the public institution will always fall short.
Public institutions buying into a competitive system pushes the harm further down to community colleges that don't have the resources to "compete" and whose missions are incompatible with that kind of competition anyway. It's trickle (more like flood) down bad.
Sure, some schools can find a competitive niche that elevates them in status, but there's often a cost to students. Alabama has leveraged their football team to a higher % of out-of-state students, but it's come at the cost of access for poorer Alabamans. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis… 
Arizona State has turned itself into some kind of corporation/innovation hub/college chimera that appears to be working out ok for them in terms of the bottom line, but they're also hugely exploiting contingent laborers in the process.
Purdue's approach has to become the partner of choice for questionable academic enterprises like Kaplan online and now Chegg, an entity that primarily exists to help students cheat. Possibly good for business, but is it good for education?
UMass is preparing to make a bet that puts the entire future on the line in trying to establish a national online college for which they will take on additional debt. They feel this is necessary because the state won't fund education.
Harvard, meanwhile, gets indirect state, federal, and local tax subsidies equal to $48,000 per student. How could UMass ever compete with that? washingtonpost.com/news/grade-poi…
To repeat from earlier this morning. Drain the swamp of elite private higher ed. End the public subsidies, put that money into public higher ed. We won't have these scandals when those admissions spots don't seem so precious.
