The thing that bothers me about the focus on elites is the implicit idea that four years at a “top tier” educational institution is something that is required for success. The corollary, that an elite education is a guarantee of success is equally false.
We’ve all read the predictions about how hard it will be for our children to maintain the economic resources necessary to maintain the lifestyles they have been brought up in. And, the increase in the cost of an elite education (and college education in general) reflects the willingness to “invest” substantial savings or go into debt to assure our children a good start in life. It’s this search for surety for our kids’ futures that I feel has fueled the applications arms race of recent years and reified the tiers and rankings into something that doesn’t really reflect reality across the board. Despite differences in starting pay or increased likelihood of becoming a Supreme Court Justice or the next tech billionaire, the fact is that most of the people who go to elite colleges will likely wind up in the same upper-middle-class lives that they would have if they had gone to their state flagships. Success (and failure) in life is most often the accumulation of many decisions and ongoing effort throughout life rather than something that can be attributed to four years spent at one kind of college vs. another.
Instead, I see it as others have explained it, a discretionary purchase and one that telegraphs to the world something about what a family values and is willing to spend money on. Which is why the experiential arguments for elite education make more sense to me than the outcome arguments.
However, cynic that I am, I do wonder if the out-of-proportion increases in tuition combined with the ever-dwindling acceptance numbers are key to maintaining the perceived value of an “elite” education as a badge of intellectual worthiness and/or a modern version of conspicuous consumption.