How to Make Elite Colleges Less Elitist

Jane Shaw, RealClearEducation

The facts are pretty damning: The Ivy League and other selective schools are bastions of privileged students. The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation finds that colleges are “highly stratified by socioeconomic class, with 72 percent of students in the nation’s most competitive institutions coming from families in the wealthiest quartile.” Meanwhile, the IRS reports “children whose parents are in the top 1 percent of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those whose parents are in the bottom income quintile.” ..................To Read More....

My Take - Personally, I don't care where people go to college, nor do I care about the income of the parents, and I don't care about whether or not there are institutions for children of the "elite" where they make important future contacts with other children of the "elite". 

To me it’s like country clubs that restrict membership to certain groups. I don't care if there's a white Anglo Saxon only club, a Jewish only club, and woman's only club or a black only club, golf or otherwise. People should have - and no matter what the Supreme Court says - the right to restrict their contacts. If some group or other wish to associate with only those who are part of their group, whether it's based on race, income, philosophy, education - then so be it! That's their business.  And I've yet to see anything that shows this whole "diversity is so important to society" has any bearing on reality.  Forced diversity is morally repugnant. 

I care about is the fact these institutions are outrageously expensive and the public is paying obscene amounts to get educations that are often times worthless – and the foundation for all these insane costs can be directed at government interfering with student loans. So many are either not graduating, or graduating with diplomas that can only get them jobs that will not generate the kind of money necessary to pay those loans back without long term economic suffering.

Higher education is a scam and worse yet, as so many have noticed, when you send your children to these universities you get back a bunch of leftist vipers who've been indoctrinated with leftist insanity by academics who can't tie their shoes on their own.

Elitism isn't the problem with higher education. We need to make all these institutions "for profit" institutions without government grant money or student loans. Let them promote themselves based on what they teach and who they've hired to do the teaching. It's sad to say, but it's my opinion the majority of kids going to college shouldn't be there. They're wasting their time and money. End the funding – and so much of what’s wrong with higher education will go away on its own.

As for the idea we have to have a degree in higher education to get a good job. Baloney! This is America, we can make our own opportunities. As one longtime owner of a pest control company once said to me. I make a whole lot more money than these university PhD’s.

Years ago, the Cleveland Plain Dealer used to publish who were the top 25 richest people in America. If nothing ever reinforced the idea - This is America", you can to anything - this demonstrates it. Of the top 25 richest people in the nation - the top 12 or 13 are always new money, and most of those got there without a university degree. Get over it!

I'm not disparaging education. What I'm disparaging higher education. It deserves to be disparaged. They’ve earned it!