Harvard, Yale, Princeton, blah, blah, blah — our national conversation about higher education is dominated by the supposedly elite schools, and students (and their parents) go to absurd lengths to get into one of them. Very few students actually attend them, however, and educationally, they’re not as special as we’re made to think.
So maybe we should stop obsessing over them. That’s the argument of Gary Frankel in today’s Martin Center article.
He writes:
But whatever the merits of this approach may be, conservative reformers heap far too much attention on a very small number of schools. Private, highly selective schools serve only about 4% of students, yet they tend to dominate the higher education reform conversation. Community colleges, regional public universities, and even many state flagship universities, all of which have far more bearing on a far greater number of Americans, garner a fraction of the scrutiny, ink, or outrage. For a movement that aims to speak to Middle America, this is a bizarre misallocation of resources.
A big part of the problem, in Frankel’s view, is that people on the right largely buy into the leftist notion that you’re more successful if you attend an Ivy League school rather than a regional state university, and if you leave your “flyover country” home for one of the big blue cities.
Read the whole thing.