This concluding paragraph of a Los Angeles Times opinion piece by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, authors of a much-discussed new book about American universities, gets at something ol’ UD has pondered many a year.

There’s a significant disconnect, at universities ranging from the most rapaciously crass for-profit to the most hopelessly threadbare non-profit, between what people willingly pay for the education and the degree on offer and what, in many cases, the education and the degree are worth. Let me elaborate.

We’ll start here: By UD‘s reckoning, only diploma mills represent true higher ed efficiency pricing. Why?

Consider diploma mill costs first from the student’s perspective.

On the one hand, she’ll earn her diploma in seconds.

On the other, as countless ruined political and professional lives have made known to her, it’s a risky degree, subject at any moment to exposure.

Yet generations of diploma mill graduates have faked their way through white-collar lives without exposure… Statistically, she’s likely to get away with upping her public school or military salary by purchasing, with the press of a key, a pretend master’s …

What’s she willing to pay?

Well if the thing cost nothing, or cost $21.49 like a Popeil Pocket Fisherman, it would make her nervous. It would seem really obviously cheesy and bogus. In some part of her mind she’s working on believing in the authenticity of the degree in case she’s ever, you know, asked about it… It should cost a plausible amount so she can say, if cornered, I thought it was a legit university! I paid a huge sum!

Hm… hm…

Something in the low thousands? Hell, she might even be able to get her agency to spring for the tuition, or part of it… After all, the only reason she knows about the particular diploma mill she’s considering is that Sid two cubicles over got his promotion by getting the agency to pay for his diploma mill degree. One afternoon, over coffee, he told her about it…

Yes, the low thousands. Real universities charge in the thousands, don’t they? But it’d have to be really low thousands. She’s not made of money.

How about pricing from the perspective of the diploma mill?

Its only costs involve printing, posting, and – if it’s one of the diploma mill Ivies – the hiring of a guy with a cell phone to make up shit if potential employers call for references.

Plenty of people all over the world want its services. Its business is a raging success. It could probably charge two hundred dollars per degree and do nicely.

But it wants to make a huge profit. Who wouldn’t? And it’s peculiarly well-situated to do so. Low to vanishing overhead, a globeful of grasping morons.

And the beauty of it is that the diploma mill has to charge rather a lot in order to make the education look legit.

Plus keep in mind that huge numbers of its customers are rich people from Saudi Arabia and places like that… And tons of American employers subsidize employee education and don’t check out the universities employees say they’re attending…

So the diploma mill goes for a nice even number: One thousand dollars. Or if that sounds too arbitrary, as if the mill hasn’t done the complex math to match the complex intellectual apparatus it represents, make it, uh, $1,210. Something like that.

And indeed something like that — something that makes good sense to customer and provider — is what most diploma mills charge.

Whew. All this math has exhausted UD. She’ll write more later.