the wealthy are paying for status (and perhaps peer effects) more so than they are paying for educational programming.
Schools respond when people pay for status: we get beautiful buildings, wonderful extracurriculars, and a lot of social events.
Of course, these things don’t spread to all schools because they involve costly goods rather than innovations in instruction.
So instead of the wealthy subsidizing the early adoption of innovation, the reverse seems more likely true: it’s the practices of urban charter schools (Teach Like A Champion, Leveraged Leadership, blended learning, etc.) that will end up spreading to the suburbs.
Read the whole thing. If elite schools are status goods, then it will be difficult to dislodge them from their perches–until it becomes easy. I have suggested before that you could see a very rapid “tipping” away from elite schools. Once enough parents decide that there are other ways to achieve parenting status than sending kids to erstwhile elite schools, the elite schools collapse.
…and what about those peer effects? Aren’t the peer effect alone enough to prop up the Ivies plus several concentric rings of wannabes?
Thanks for the post, Arnold.
As for peer effects, there’s a world where this could be achieved for much cheaper – with Minerva like entities providing status and peer effects for a lower cost.
What I hope happens is that MOOCs simply opens up the opportunity to be more of the meritocracy it is assumed to be.
What I hope doesn’t happen is that it causes a singularity of singular star teachers in each field who charge exhorbitant fees for the class.
“Once enough parents decide that there are other ways to achieve parenting status than sending kids to erstwhile elite schools, the elite schools collapse.”
Well, students want status for themselves too. And anyway, people are always going to want some to signal status, so what alternative will pop up that’s as salient and compelling and has that impressive, instantly recognizable name-recognition?
I can see, for example, how Dartmouth can collapse and fall from the graces of the top-10, but there will always be some equivalent of an A-list that people want to get on.
I think there’s going to be a tipping point for the bottom 85% of universities much sooner than the ivies and other elite schools.
The value of the ivies is primarily peer effects. So long as they remain the best place to hang out with other brilliant, financially well-endowed people they’ll still be a good deal, even if they cost 250k+.
The bottom 85% basically sell peer-effect and exclusivity illusion and people are slowly coming around to the fact that the emperor has no clothes. I think they’ll start to see their enrollments plummet (a lot of them already have) and they’ll either be forced to close if they’re private, consolidate into large state conglomerates if they’re public, or change their function as the higher educational system evolves to a more networked model with different universities serving more narrowly defined functions rather than the individual fiefdoms they are today.
I think Jonathan Bechtel is closer to right than anyone else, in that the lower ranked schools are more at risk than the Ivies.
However, we have nothing reliable to replace sitting in school and passing classes for four years. Any sort of testing credential system will be open to rampant cheating. Microsoft and other test based certification providers spend a small fortune to stop cheating, and they still have terrible problems.
MOOCs are currently a joke, just an online lecture system—and in the end, to be useful as certification, they’ll need a test. See above paragraph.
The real problem is that we’re sending way too many people to college, because we can’t use the usual cognitive standards without basically eliminating college as an option for 70-80% of blacks and Hispanics.