The Beginning of the End of the Cult of the Good School?

By "cult of the Good School" I refer to the profoundly irrational hierarchy that exists among institutions of higher learning in the minds of the conventional wisdom-abiding.

In speaking of that hierarchy as irrational I am not denying that schools differ with regard to the selectivity of their student intake, and the resources available to them for the fulfillment of their educational mission; or denying that that selectivity and those resources may make a difference in the quality of the education and/or training they impart to their graduates. Nor do I deny that these practical differences--or for that matter, the less rational reliance on institutional "reputation"--may make a difference to employers, with implications for their graduates' outcomes with regard to employment and income.

However, the truth is that very few making distinctions among those schools actually know anything about how the schools in question actually stack up against each other in even the more measurable, practical ways (for instance, the average quality of undergraduate instruction); or actually know anything about exactly what difference the school a student graduated from makes in the job market. Rather they just "know" that one school is "better" than others, with most carrying around an image of various strata in their minds--with the Ivy League "better" than others, and within that stratum Harvard better than Yale, all as private schools generally come in ahead of public schools, etcetera, etcetera, albeit with many exceptions all along the line. (Much as many desire to park their car in Harvard yard, the science major will not be looked down upon for choosing the Massachusetts Institute of Technology instead--while Berkley, UCLA, Chapel Hill, among others, in spite of being state institutions, are quite well respected indeed, more so than most private institutions.)

Those who think this way imagine that any young person of intelligence and ambition ought to aim as high as they can in the hierarchy--and if they do not their elders, and conforming peers, think there is something wrong with them. Should they question those elders' and those peers' presumption they will not get an intelligent answer--this "Just what people do."

The insistence on all this ultimately come down to simple-minded snobbery, especially insofar as the data that even the more rigorous sift tend to be flawed and even corrupt. Meanwhile a good deal of longstanding statistical data, confirmed again and again by more recent studies, calls into question the idea of some great wage premium deriving from going to the elite institutions, or even inherent employability. The "power elite" may disproportionately be associated with such colleges, but, even setting aside the fact that the advantages most of them had did not begin or end with the college they attended (where they are, after all, less likely to be going because they were exceptionally bright than because they were exceptionally privileged), the average is a different matter. Stupid writers for trash publications may make claims such as that one can major in somersaults at Harvard and still get a "good job," but as was reconfirmed by a recent study, your major is probably going to be a bigger determinant of whether you get a job in your line and what it will pay than the school to which you went.

However, this foolishness is now up against an era of tighter means, diminished prospects, and greater skepticism about the value of a college education generally, and specific avenues to getting a college education particularly--and as a result of weighing the actual dollars and cents return on their investment in a college degree, and finding that they will very probably be better off commuting to the nearest campus of the university system in their state (maybe after racking up as many credits as they can at the still closer closest campus of their community college) than selling themselves into lifetime debt slavery for "the college experience" of which so many college presidents pompously speak at a Brand Name School. Of course, considering that it is worth acknowledging that the people whose ideas are the mainstream ideas are the ones most remote from the situation of tightened means and diminished prospects; and have absolutely zero respect for the views of the majority. Still, their changing attitude in the face of the crass stupidities of the Cult of the Good School seem likely to increasingly expose those crass stupidities for exactly what they are over time.