(1) Market the university to students as a credentialing service, in which the credential is delivered in return for payment of tuition.
(2) Encourage students to place heavy emphasis on the reputational value of the credential as they attempt to sell themselves on the wage-slave market.
(3) Make departmental budgets and faculty lines dependent on student enrollments.
(4) In evaluating professors for tenure and promotion, measure quality of teaching by student evaluations.
Results: (1) Students will come for the credential, not for the education.
(2) While the average amount of student effort will affect the value of the credential, the effort of a single student will not, creating a classic collective action problem.
(3) Programs that make it difficult to acquire the credential will lose students, setting Gresham's Law into operation.
(4) Since student evaluations correlate more highly with expected grade than with any other single factor, Gresham's Law is reinforced.
Sounds like my school. Sounds like Yates's school. Sound like anyone else's school?
Michael McIntyre