"Elite" universities are obsolete.

This is from a Facebook post I made today. It seemed worthy of an independent post.

"Elite" universities are obsolete.

Education is the transfer of information, nothing more. It is no different from media and entertainment. Only the content differs, and the fact there will be a test at the end to validate the transfer.

Information is infinitely reproducible, and always has been, but the cost of reproduction has collapsed. That started with Gutenberg over 5 centuries ago, but was accelerated by the digitization and the Internet. The marginal cost of a digital copy is nearly zero.

Information is easily transmitted. Again, during the era of horses and sailing ships, transmission was slow. But since the telegraph, then the radio, later television, and now the Internet, the marginal cost of transmission of information is nearly zero.

The textbook industry is a racket (racket as is racketeering, as is RICO statute), but it has served to reproduce and transmit information. UC Berkeley's David Patterson's "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" has been used by computer science students around the world for 30 years. Every MBA program has emulated the Harvard Case Method since the mid-1980s.

What makes an elite university "elite"? It is actually simple, and it is two things: One, they have huge endowments which allow them to hire the preeminent academics, originally for teaching, but today primarily for research; and two, the elite universities stratify and vet the top 1% of total high school graduates in the U.S. SAT and ACT tests are a reasonable proxy for general intelligence, and elite universities pull from 98th percentile and higher SATs. Most students going to an elite university come from elite high schools, and are in the top 5% or higher of those elite high schools. Going to an elite university doesn't make you "smart". You have to be smart to get in in the first place.

The "elite" universities are made elite by elite researchers and elite students, not by elite teaching or elite content.

The idea of traveling far from home to distant hallowed halls, to be verbally instructed and mentored by wise old sages, the sole custodians of knowledge, is obsolete.

I should probably add, while the elite universities can stratify and vet the top 1% of high school graduates based on objective academic credentials, their ability to stratify and vet beyond those are limited. Sure, they can look at extra-curricular and volunteer activities, along with letters of recommendation in an attempt to view the "whole person", but those are easily gamed. More easily than padding academics, improving academics through tutoring, and improving admission test scores through specialized preparation. Indeed, we saw in the recent scandal, most of the assistance was through fake sports, etc., and a lesser extent was outright cheating on admission tests.

What that means is graduates of elite universities are in no way our moral betters, any more that morality correlates to IQ or academic success. And this is probably the great failing of the elite universities. They make no attempt to impart or distill morality, unlike the charter of the military academies.

Imagine if Harvard added a freshman indoctrination on par with the military academies, putting the incoming class under intense physical and psychological pressure. Imagine if someone psychologically cracked, struck out at a classmate, or disrespected an authority figure they were shown the door.

That would make the "elite" universities elite.