|
Look, I agree many models may work. But it's easy to see that in each one, prestige is meaningless when you're trying to decide the underlying quality of the education (as opposed to the value of the signal).
Take the Podolny story. Prestige there is just this membership which is hard to get and valuable by virtue of that alone. The whole point of these models is that they assume that there is nothing intrinsically better about the prestigious place and try to explain it purely as a coordination phenomenon. And all of them succeed from different angles.
So the market is only measuring a coin flip -- where people decided to coordinate. It is quite possible in each of these models that another place would give you a better education, and people are still herding on the inferior prestigious place because of the signaling value.
Obviously the signal must be very valuable -- nobody's arguing against that. I'm just saying, the prestige ranking here is not measuring quality of the education. In the most idealized free market nut world, it's measuring the net present value of the signal PLUS the education, and if you don't care about status, it will often be true that the better education (in an intellectual sense) is to be found at the less prestigious place.
|