I agree with a number of the points made in David Leonhardt’s post/column on the problems with higher education but I disagree vehemently with this:
We know which colleges admit the best-prepared group of high school graduates (Harvard and the other colleges atop the U.S. News ranking).
Indeed, I think that this is one of the bigger problems with higher education. This is either an exaggeration, misleading, or it’s a lie.
The key words in the statement are “best-prepared” and “group”, The flaw in the statement is revealed by an old joke:
Q: What do you call the guy who graduated last in his class from medical school?
A: Doctor
There is no uniform, reliable method for evaluating preparedness among all of the high school graduates in the country and the admissions standards are not uniform among colleges.
Q: What do you call the least-prepared (whatever that means) high school graduate admitted to Harvard?
A: “Admitted to Harvard”
While it might be true that as a group the 1,600 high school graduates admitted to Harvard every year are the best-prepared that says nothing whatever about whether as individuals they’re the best-prepared. It might be that the best-prepared 1,600 high school graduates in the country are spread out among 1,600 colleges most of us have never heard of. There’s just no way to tell. Additionally, since elite colleges in particular don’t publish their admissions standards and procedures USNWR is necessarily like an Olympic figure-skating judge: their rankings aren’t based solely on the performance you just saw but on the history of performances by the competitors. It could be in a given year that the 1,600 “best-prepared group of high school graduates” might be at San Diego State. There’s just no way to tell.
In an meritocratic utopia there would be no elite schools, on average any school would be as good as any other, there would be not only uniform admissions standards throughout the country but common admissions throughout the country (as exists among a group of upper Midwestern colleges). We are not living in a meritocratic utopia. I’m not arguing that we should be.
However, I’m skeptical of a system in which “the best and the brightest” is deemed synonymous with the graduates of a handful of (mostly) eastern colleges. Can we afford to write off so many of our best and brightest who don’t happen to bear the brand name?
I thought Leonhardt wrote a really interesting piece. It comes in at quite a different angle than I normally view things, and I’m not quite ready to accept that costs are not the key problem, but still … interesting.
On your theme, he seems to touch that here:
You’ve got to have a test like that that you trust, and give it to incoming freshmen, to know how well prepared everyone is.
I think the linked Yglesias piece on “disrupting college” is good:
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/02/disrupting-college-2/
That’s what I want to see tried.
(IOW, Leonhardt might be asserting something about those freshmen, and then acknowledging a problem with measurement.)
“Can we afford to write off so many of our best and brightest who don’t happen to bear the brand name?”
Absolutely not. With a slightly different cant – when I started talking about going to Harvard etc my father looked at me and deadpanned “am I to understand that you would exhaust the resources of all other schools?” The point was not missed, although
That said, I think there is something to be said for playing with generally first flight competition. Let’s face it AAA baseball ain’t the big leagues.
BTW – having lived in CT and worked in NY for 6 years (and still do alot of business there) I can tell you first hand the most self important people on earth are the Ivy Leaguers, especially harvard and Yale. I suspect the Stanfordites are similar.