Reply to How well does the US News rankings correlate with actual prestige?

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[quote=Anonymous]Common App and USNWR certainly didn’t help, but the problems US higher education faces seem pretty structural to me.  Once you have first a national, then a global marketplace for higher education alongside attempts to dismantle the race/class/gender-based forms of discrimination that limited access to it, demand for elite schools increases dramatically.  Throw in disinvestment in (and increasing tuition costs at) public universities both here and abroad, along with the fact that much of the higher education system in the US is private (so it’s a competitive market and each institution has to find ways to finance its operations) and you’ve got a mess.  Add to the mix a society whose self-understanding is that the system is meritocratic and upward mobility is and should be a reasonable expectation, facing a moment in its history where many of the previously most-entitled/secure groups find themselves feeling increasingly desperate about the life-chances their kids face and you’ve got a whole lot of drama on top of an effed-up market place.  And, of course, that’s before we factor in outrageous tuition costs and student loan debt.

Something’s gotta give and even eliminating USNWR and the Common App wouldn’t change that.  Meanwhile, technology will make a lot of jobs obsolete and also has the potential to supply education in a way that doesn’t rely on physically assembling students in one place.  And that threat make schools sell (and invest heavily in) “the college experience” rather than education.[/quote]

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