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Comment by soldehierro | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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.

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