The Education Trust has just released a new study that amounts to griping that the wealthiest colleges and universities don’t do enough to make it affordable for students from poor families to attend. It has the sorts of people who are tasked with defending the high-endowment schools in a tizzy, arguing that it isn’t fair, overlooks stuff, and so on.

Sadly, what those people can’t or won’t say is that the premise that students from poor families really need to attend these very expensive schools is wrong. Graduating from a high-cost and supposedly elite college is neither necessary nor sufficient for those students (or any others for that matter) to get a good education and have a prosperous life. A good student from a rather impecunious family in North Carolina, for instance, doesn’t have to go to Duke, but will do fine (perhaps even better) by going to one of the UNC institutions or a reasonably priced private college.

Too bad that the Ed Trust folks have fallen for the Chivas Regal effect — the notion that the more you spend on tuition, the better the education you get. That just ain’t so.