My Substack this week is about ending our obsession with elite private universities, which dominate our discourse on higher ed despite representing a tiny number of students.
This one has been percolating for a long time, so please give it a look and share it with a friend. Here's my favorite passage:
"Now that I live in a well-to-do New Jersey suburb and teach at a private school in New York City I see how getting your child into an Ivy League university is the ultimate bourgeois class status trump card. Those Instagrammable vacations abroad and renovated kitchens are nice, but can’t measure up to having offspring at Yale. That eventuality proves that you are the true winner of the game of Meritocracy.
It’s telling that the quality of education is rarely cited as the motivation. It’s all about power, status, and “connections.” Critics of the Supreme Court are rightly concerned that their decision will narrow the range of people who can get into these hallowed, ivied walls of power. While that is a concern, the far bigger problem is that these institutions have such prominence in our society in the first place.
It is frankly obscene that the elite of a democratic society is being manufactured by private institutions with no obligations to the public. Their favoritism towards “legacies” puts lie to their pretensions of “meritocracy.” It is also obscene that state university systems face cutbacks when Harvard has an endowment the size of a small country’s GDP. In a just world, these institutions would be expropriated out of existence."
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