The more I read about this admissions and enrollment cycle, the farther back my mind goes: Sometimes it wanders all the way back to my first college fair program in Eagle Grove, Iowa, and the first student I ever talked to (I remember his unusual first name, so I went to Classmates, but that particular yearbook was not available, so I can’t see if he made anything of himself); sometimes it goes back to the year 2000, when a radical, almost prescient innovation hit the market: Ecollegebid.com.

The original site and the idea have long faded from memory, but perhaps the latter shouldn’t.

The idea was simple: The cost of a private college, Tedd Kelly thought, was getting too high, and many middle class parents were getting squeezed. Why not make it easy for students to put their credentials in a database, along with a “strike price” and see how many offers they could get? The college makes an offer it can live with, and the parents get a price they’re comfortable with. It wasn’t exclusive, of course, so students could use it as a hedge while they were applying elsewhere.

And, at the same time, why not give some colleges with less appeal a chance to find students who would be happy to enroll? Why not give colleges an alternative to Student Search that includes not just biodemographic and academic variables, but those financial variables we in higher education put at the worst point in the process: At the very end.

It was a great idea, and I was a big fan conceptually, although I suspected Tedd had not story-boarded the game all the way to the end, and it seems I was at least partially right. It never got off the ground, and I’m not even sure the business lasted a year.

There’s a reason innovation in higher education so often fails, if it even gets off the ground in the first place: it’s a sort of variation of The Tragedy of the Commons. When you assume all the risk, and a project fails, you carry the whole cost of it. When you assume risk and win, others will soon rush in to copy you. It’s not exactly an incentive-based concept. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The only thing that’s incentivized is not innovating.

It’s why we see so many communications that sound exactly alike. It’s why all the new ideas are just old ideas using new technology. And it’s why so many Ed Startups, started by fresh-faced MBAs with a great idea dozens of others have had before flame out within a year.

I wonder when disruption will come. Then again, as long as we’re talking about the lack of innovation of ideas, I’ve been wondering this for at least a decade.

So there you have it. QED, as the mathematicians would say.