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Comment by dumbfoundded | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that elite colleges aren't building the best education. They're building the most elite network of future leaders. Education in terms of content is all but free now. MIT, Stanford and others give away so much of their course materials. The one thing you can't replace is the connections and reputation. In this way you can't just keep bump up the number of students .

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It's interesting how many people in the intellectual elite, otherwise, buy into "quality" as an explanation for the apparent success of elite education, overlooking selection biases as an explanation.

Education isn't a luxury good, and it shouldn't be treated like one. Education can and should be democratized without sacrifing quality.

Education is pretty well democratized but can be improved. Elite networks aren't and probably can't.

The luxury good aspect is the tyranny of the normal curve - the best will always be more sought after. Decommoditization ensues. It is the demand which truly makes a luxury good.

Of course they do. They are the ones who benefit the most from the idea that an elite education is higher quality.

Educational Information has already been democratized by MIT Open Courseware, Khan, and others. But Education itself is an interactive human activity carried out by an expert professional. Some of those professionals will be better at educating than others, and people will compete for access to those better educators. There is nothing about Education as a profession that suggests it can be democratized, because the fundamental operational units (educators) are not scalable the way copying texts or videos is.

As a current university student, I am painfully aware that there are good educators, okay educators, and piss-poor educators, but I do think we can expand our pool of very talented educators by making the necessary investments and making teaching a more lucrative field.

This rings true. Most of my friends now that I'm older are basically people I met at Uni or people I met through them. Kind of a weird thing to optimize for though.

> Kind of a weird thing to optimize for though.

The part they left out is important: the endowment. They optimize for the endowment, and contributions towards it. “Elites” have the most money to contribute. It’s always about the money, of which Harvard has $40.9B.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University_endowment

Donors are about a quarter of the class, not all of it.

If you aren't paying, you're the product, per https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-uncharity-of-colle...

I went to Random Public University. The contacts I made there are people who went to Random Public University. The people who go to Harvard make contacts who went to Harvard. If the people who went to Harvard are, on average, more valuable to have as contacts then the people I went to school with, then it makes perfect sense to optimize for that. The education you can get anywhere, but the valuable contacts you can't.

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