The word that's made college leaders' nerves tingle in this decade has been "accountability." The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities' new online dashboard-style performance indicator is just one response to increasing demands to show that higher education institutions produce the results they promise.

While that demand won't disappear, a new one -- for greater productivity -- will soon overtake it. That's the prediction of Larry Isaak, head of the Midwestern Higher Education Compact, presented at a June 27 meeting in Minneapolis of the region's research university leaders.

Colleges will need to "become more productive by growing revenues through increased enrollments, at the same time they become more efficient in offering their services." The nation needs millions more college-educated workers, and can't -- or, politically, won't -- mount a spending surge to get them.

Isaak predicted that colleges will respond with increased Internet-based instruction and streamlined administrative and student services, while governments will increasingly offer financial incentives for educating-- and graduating -- more students.

To that forecast, we'd add this: In Minnesota, a productivity imperative will focus attention on the need to enroll more of the state's nonwhite, low-income population, underrepresented today on college campuses. And that, in turn, will require redoubled efforts to make more high school graduates college-ready.

It was one of those long morning commutes from the northern suburbs where one stoplight with messed-up timing leads to senseless backups. But on this sunny June morning, it wasn't the Brooklyn Park semaphore drawing the most ire from an editorial writer already late to work. It was the three drivers in a clogged one-mile stretch who tossed cigarette butts out their car windows without a backward glance.

Earlier this year, a fed-up student maintenance worker at Winona State University built a great smoky mountain out of the cigarette butts he'd picked up on campus. The big pile of butts went on display in the student commons to make an important point: Tossing cigarette butts on the ground isn't cool. And while one cigarette butt doesn't seem like much, they pile up. Why not put them in an ashtray or one of those handy receptacles parked outside of buildings these days?

Same goes for drivers. Many cars still have ashtrays. If yours doesn't, buy one. Flicking it out the window is littering, prompting other drivers to rightly peg you as the irresponsible type who expects others to pick up after them.