I'm back, I'm rested, and I'm resuming regular blogging.

Catching up on my cant watching, I ran across a hilarious note in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about a former law student at England's University of Wolverhampton who sued the school for not providing a quality education (alas, the story is only available to Chron subscribers, but I'll summarize fully here).

Michael Austen, a former pilot in his mid-fifties, "said he had been duped by a promotional CD-ROM that featured a student professing to have turned down Oxford and Cambridge to go to Wolverhampton." While Oxford and Cambridge are among the top schools in Britain, the teaching quality at Wolverhampton, it seems, ranks 125 out of Britain's 151 universities. Its law program ranks 72 out of Britain's 88 law schools. Unable, apparently, either to research schools himself or to distinguish self-promotion from objective reporting, the young and impressionable Mr. Austen mistook Wolverhampton's advertising hype for factual representation and wound up enrolled at a school where "he found not exalted Oxbridgean intellectual discourse, but rather overcrowded classes, incompetent or even absent lecturers, and error-riddled assignments." Wolverhampton settled out of court, paying Austen the equivalent of $47,000 in order to avoid steep legal costs. Just as Austen acknowledged no responsibility for his error, the university acknowledged no wrong-doing. Austen will continue his legal education at a higher-ranked school this year; Wolverhampton will continue offering low quality legal education to all those dumb enough to take its overblown recruitment materials at face value.

What I love about this: not Wolverhampton's pathetically inflated self-presentation, not the graying flyboy's unconvincing posture of innocent victimhood, but the tactical possibilities presented to students by the gap between what universities say they provide and what they actually do provide. In the U.S., false advertising is a major problem in higher education. It's also an untapped potential. College catalogues and brochures always promise students an enriching educational experience, and they almost always equate that experience with such things as small class size and close contact with eminent professors. But the reality is frequently far different, especially at large universities. Class sizes can run in the hundreds, especially in the gateway math and science courses that dominate the schedules of so many freshman and sophomores. And a huge percentage of courses are taught not by "eminent professors" but by graduate students and grossly overworked, underpaid adjunct lecturers.

Yale is a case in point. By one estimate, 70% of the courses at Yale are taught by grad students and part-timers. The Yale administration disputes this, claiming that only 33% are taught by students and non-tenure track faculty. Apparently, parents who are shelling out the price of a house to send their kids to Yale are supposed to be relieved by the news that only a third of the classes there are taught by cheap, temporary labor. But parents would have to be crazy to be satisfied with such numbers--or with such advertising. Yale advertises a student-faculty ratio of 7:1, and claims to offer over 2000 courses in over 70 majors. It proclaims a firm commitment to undergraduate education, noting that "all tenured faculty teach undergraduate courses," that 75% of courses enroll fewer than 20 students, and that 29% of courses enroll fewer than 10 students. While these claims may technically be true, they work together to create a false impression of a school where undergraduates regularly rub shoulders with illustrious faculty in small, intimate seminar settings. The student-faculty ratio may be low, but that doesn't tell us anything about how many courses are taught by graduate students and part-timers. All tenured faculty may teach undergraduate courses, but that tells us nothing about how often they do so, or how many undergraduate courses they offer. There may be a lot of small classes--but that tells us nothing about who teaches them. Yale may offer a total of 2000 courses--but you can bet it doesn't offer anywhere near that in any given semester. You can also bet that a number of courses on the books have not been taught in years. With a $10.7 billion endowment, Yale is one of the richest schools in the world and should be able to create just the sort of environment it promises. But it hasn't. The price of Yale, apparently, is the price of maintaining a costly illusion.

The point is not to single out Yale. What happens there happens everywhere. And that is the point: across the country, universities are engaging in misleading--and often patently false--advertising. They are recruiting students on the basis of that advertising, and they are pocketing steep tuition fees in exchange for an experience they do not reliably provide. Each school that does so is a lawsuit waiting to happen. The suits could be filed by individuals. Or--better--by groups. A series of high profile class action lawsuits against universities that are shortchanging and overcharging students could well be an important means of beginning a desperately needed, long deferred reformation of higher education in America.