In an era of overabundance, elite colleges matter more than ever
The following stories went viral this week: Harvard applications drop 5% after year of turmoil on the Ivy League campus; and by Nate Silver, Go to a state school.
Every year, for the flimsiest of justification or evidence, pundits trot out the same tired predictions or pronouncements about how the ‘Ivy League has peaked’ or ‘elite degrees losing luster’. The ongoing campus protests and antisemitism controversies in the aftermath of October 7th has seen an uptick of these stories:
And year after year, such proclamations ring hollow as elite colleges remain competitive. I saw this same pattern in 2020-2021 during Covid in which pundits similarly predicted online learning would topple the college hegemony or something to that effect. For example, from The Financial Times in April 2020, Coronavirus bursts the US college education bubble. 4 years later has it burst? Hardly.
For reasons that were never made all that clear, online classes would somehow replace traditional 4-year degrees. Or erode or dilute the prestige of top colleges. Neither of those predictions came to be. Ivy League demand and prestige continued to surge after Covid despite the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs). Harvard’s acceptance rate is only 3.5 percent. (Google gives 3.2 percent; nevertheless, it’s very low.) From the above CBS article:
