Mr. Levine singled out the "inadequate to appalling" graduate programs in educational leadership and called for the abolition of the Ed.D. degree. These programs, he asserted, suffer under the weight of lax admissions standards, weak faculties and inappropriate degree requirements and are often cynically used by their host universities as "cash cows." A rather bold bit of truth-telling on his part; and apparently there are three more such scathing reports coming from Mr. Levine, as part of a project underwritten by the Annenberg, Ford, Kauffman and Wallace Foundations.

Now, one shouldn't get too excited and expect such daring words to generate perestroika in the closed and self-perpetuating universe of ed schools. Mr. Levine deliberately refrains in his report from naming any specific institutions that are failing. Moreover, his enthusiasm for reform has somehow not extended to any effort to get his own institution to eliminate the Ed.D.

In fact, Mr. Levine has played his reformist cards so close to the vest that his own faculty and students appear to have been shocked, and bitterly upset, to find out that he believed such things. So real change is going to be glacial at best. But still, it's encouraging to see such a notable figure in the education world begin to acknowledge how much is amiss in the way this country teaches teachers.

In keeping with this candor, we should acknowledge that there are similar deficiencies in graduate education in nearly all academic fields, across the board. Those professors who like to look down their noses at the ed schools and call for their elimination would do well to look in the mirror first. For one of the most striking deficiencies in American graduate training, in fields ranging from history and literary studies to physics and psychology, is the appalling inattention given to teaching--that is, to precisely the work that newly minted Ph.D.s will be expected to engage in for the rest of their careers. If, that is, they're lucky enough to get an academic job at all.

In fact, the problem goes beyond inattention. In the best graduate institutions, students are socialized into the view that teaching is a lowly activity. This view is everywhere reinforced by the willingness of universities to use graduate teaching assistants and untenured adjunct faculty to carry more and more of the instructional load.

It's a wonder that there are as many outstanding college teachers as there are. In my own graduate years, I saw eager-beaver teaching assistants subtly encouraged by their advisers to cool it and spend as little time as possible on their teaching, lest they be taken for unserious and unscholarly lightweights. They were there to do research and eventually to get jobs like. . .well, like those of their advisers, in which the teaching responsibilities are dumped on lowly graduate students.

In effect, most American graduate schools prepare students for jobs that they will never have and fail to prepare them--even conveying disdain--for the jobs that they will most likely have. No area of American higher education is more in need of reform, and none is less likely to receive it. As our chief means of forming college teachers, graduate education could hardly be more dysfunctional if we had set out to make it that way.

The result can be seen in every American college and university, where good teaching is rarely recognized and even more rarely rewarded. But this state of affairs may not continue indefinitely, as a new force for reform could come from the outside, from the consumer. William Strauss and Neil Howe have recently argued in the Chronicle of Higher Education that with tuition and the resulting debt reaching surreal levels, and colleges and universities failing to reverse the post-1960s collapse of academic standards, parents and students are increasingly skeptical about the value of a college education.

Parents born after 1961, Messrs. Strauss and Howe have found, experienced that collapse of standards in their own college educations and are determined not to tolerate another overpriced and underperforming disappointment for their own children. This is the generation that "propelled school choice, vouchers, charter schools, home-schooling and the standards-and-accountability movement." These parents will be more likely to treat higher education as a market, in which smart buyers exercise discretion.

Academics tend to be contemptuous of markets, which is why the for-profit University of Phoenix is their bête noire. But markets will do a better job of sorting these things out, at least in some aspects, than the accredited professionals who, after all, merely respond to a system that rewards time spent on research and scoffs at time spent on teaching. Such incentives need to change.

It will be a good thing if parents and students become more demanding, and it will be a very good thing if more sources of information are made available to them about what constitutes good teaching and where it is taking place--and not taking place. There is a huge and completely unanswered need for college guides that are as frank, intelligent and unsparingly honest about the quality of undergraduate instruction as consumer guides are about, say, cars and stereo equipment. Unless, that is, we think of higher education as nothing more than a credential and a badge, a source of social prestige that we buy for ourselves and our kids. In that case, we will continue to get what we pay for.

—Mr. McClay teaches history and humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.