A new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research comes to the hardly surprising conclusion that colleges often cater to the desires of students for “country club” amenities. Almost all students like their creature comforts and campus fun, while “the taste for academic quality is confined to high-achieving students.” That being the case, it will not be easy to raise the level of teaching quality by searching for enough students who really care about that to elicit more effort from faculty members used to getting by with minimal effort, as today’s Pope Center piece argues.