The good editors at The Wall Street Journal opined on the leaked-to-the-press Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. They’ve missed on a couple of their points.

Where the compact goes too far is with its demand that schools freeze tuition for five years….

The editors noted that Mitch Daniels succeeded in this for more than just five years, and they insist that the matter should be left to the schools. The editors missed the simple fact that the matter is still left to the schools: they still can set their own tuition rates; they don’t have to sign the Compact, which is an entirely voluntary thing. They’ll still have access to Federal funding, too; they just won’t get preferential treatment.

…cap the enrollment of international students at 15%.

The editors worried about where that threshold came from, since they couldn’t understand it. The short answer, and the long answer, is Who cares? It’s a cutoff point easily achievable that leaves predictable room for (qualified) American students. As this graph shows, there are plenty of schools that would create that room were they to similarly cap their international enrollment:

The only serious question here is whether international enrollment should be capped at all, not quibbling over limits.

The editors’ rationalization for their beefs are that

Limiting tuition and international students at the same time could leave schools with a budget shortfall.

This would be just silly if the editors hadn’t tacitly accepted the Left’s penchant for spending as sacrosanct. The schools always can reallocate their spending, and they always can reduce their spending to fit the revenues coming in. There’s nothing in the proposed Compact to prevent that exercise in fiscal responsibility.

And this:

Well-intentioned but hard to implement is the compact’s effort to combat grade inflation. The compact demands that schools “commit to grade integrity and the use of defensible standards for whether students are achieving their goals.” Good luck trying to figure that out. Will a fleet of auditors investigate if slackers really deserved an A- in Econ 101?

What, then, is the editors’ solution? Just roll over and give up on solving a difficult problem? Their silence on this speaks volumes. It also demonstrates that their comfort zone is up on the porch, whence they can yap in complete safety.