There are two reasons why the educational experience is more or less the same across American universities. The first was described in the previous chapter. Universities do not have good means to monitor teaching quality, much less provide professors with incentives to do a better job at teaching. It is simply hard to tell if particular professors are doing a good job in the classroom and therefore it is hard to motivate them to do a better job. And because teaching quality is difficult to sell to the world at large—who verifies that one college does it better than others? —colleges tend not to encourage it.
Professors do not earn large rewards—promotions or raises—for great classroom performance and so do not always give it their all. In fact, faculty at higher-ranked universities are under less pressure to teach well simply because they are under greater pressure to do research. As you go down the academic hierarchy, the emphasis on teaching actually goes up.