From one state to another, boards of trustees, legislatures, and governors are implementing policies designed to increase output and efficiency in public colleges and universities. Many such policies reflect the agenda of the National Governors Association's Complete to Compete initiative, which seeks to increase completion rates without increasing public investment. This state-level agenda is often linked to the broader goal of dramatically enlarging the proportion of the US population that is college educated. Nationally, these productivity objectives are articulated in a policy discourse focused on international competitiveness--as in the Obama administration's "race to the top" and the Lumina Foundation's "big goal" agendas, both of which are designed to ensure that the United States will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. Despite a highly partisan political environment, governors of both parties support the completion agenda, which at its core combines efforts to enhance production efficiencies with an anti-government-spending austerity agenda of cut, cut, cut. Yet, the completion agenda is incomplete. It is an unfunded mandate to do more with less. Moreover, the agenda does not address the key educational, social, and economic challenges people face. It offers no mechanisms for enhancing quality, reducing non-meritocratic social stratification, or building a new economy. Worse still, the completion agenda is counterproductive. In regard to educational quality, the completion agenda is compromising the learning agenda. In analyzing the completion agenda's implications for academe and the academy, the author writes from three perspectives. He writes as the former general secretary of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). He also writes as a professor whose research focuses on higher education policy and restructuring academic institutions/professions, and whose university, the University of Arizona, is a relatively open-access public land-grant research university--a university and a state that have become markers for the country in accommodating (or not) the growth demographic of traditional-age students. Finally, he writes as the father of two daughters, each of whom is a doctoral student in a high-demand field, which gives him insight into and particular concern about the effects of current policies on the future of academe (the professoriate) and the academy (higher education).