<p>A restaurant can only meet so much demand. If there is only one restaurant in a 20 mile radius that serves delicious steak but millions of people nearby love steak, that restaurant is overcrowded whenever it’s open and very few people can get a table there.</p>
<p>Naturally, people who can cook steak very well don’t let that happen. They make their own restaurants and offer steak because they know there are many people who would happily pay for it. The chefs profit and steak lovers have new opportunities to enjoy something they want.</p>
<p>But imagine that people ignore 90% of those restaurants and still overcrowd the few that are considered to be the best, driving all over town hoping in vain to find a restaurant on their short list that doesn’t have a wait time so long that there wouldn’t be a seat available by the end of business hours. Many restaurants have plenty of empty tables despite aggressive advertising; others would crowd the sidewalks with lines of people even if they never lifted a finger to put their name out there.</p>
<p>How much is it due to the scarcity of restaurants whose steak is actually delicious and how much is it due to unwillingness of people to consider given restaurants as good options?</p>
<p>Most importantly, if very few restaurants cook steak very well, why don’t other restaurants take the hint from the market and improve themselves?</p>
<p>I present this analogy because, when critiqued, flawed analogies can really reveal the nature of what they analogize. So…</p>
<p>How can this analogy be developed?
Example: name brand - some restaurants are famous and their names pop into people’s minds when they crave steak.</p>
<p>How is this analogy irreparably flawed?
Example: if a restaurant has a big line, that normally turns people away from it rather than drawing them to it. (What good is a meal if you have to wait two hours in the cold to eat it?)</p>
<p>I biggest problem I see with the analogy: the assumption that people stampede to the popular restaurants primarily to eat the steak, rather than to enjoy the restaurant’s ambiance and be seen there.</p>
<p>Another approach would be to ask yourself: to what degree does the restaurant industry emulate the airline industry? Many people may want to fly from NY to LA at a specific time on a specific date, but Flight XYZ can only hold a certain number of people. The airline can add more flights (offer more reservation times) or put people on stand by (“have a drink at the bar while they’re getting your table ready”). How elastic is the demand for steak or that flight? How much is it affected by the cost of labor or fuel or beef?</p>
<p>If a restaurant offers higher quality than another, people are willing to pay more and wait longer for the better restaurant. Just like they are willing to pay more and go through more hassles during the application process to attend a college that would provide a better experience and better bragging rights. (At least as perceived by the applicant.)</p>
<p>So why doesn’t the less desirable restaurant improve its food? Why doesn’t the less desirable college improve its curriculum, its research facilities, the intellectual environment it encourages, the ways it gets students to learn hands-on, …?</p>
<p>Or does it do all of that, why isn’t that enough to make people willing to pay more for it or expand their search?</p>
That’s true; food quality isn’t the only thing that makes a restaurant appealing.</p>
<p>So the analogy can be extended to asking why the restaurant still isn’t competitive despite improving all aspects of itself, or why it doesn’t improve itself enough to attract the full attention of people looking for somewhere to eat with good food, good ambiance, good service, …</p>
<p>The airline industry does not resemble the restaurant industry. </p>
<p>Airline seats are a COMMODITY. For the desired travel time, a customer (spending his/her own money) will pick the airline based on which offers the cheapest seat. The customer might be enticed to stick with a certain airline to collect freq flyer points, but will not pay a premium just to collect points. If he/she is flying on the company’s dime, then that’s a different story…</p>
<p>I dont know of anyone who will pick a restaurant based on who charges the least for a steak.</p>
<p>Actually GMT there are different segments of the air travel and some do resemble the restaurant industry. There is discretionary travel (where you are always in the market for a flight from NY to Cleveland if the price is right); there is business travel (where someone else is paying for the ticket and you absolutely positively have to be there tomorrow by 9 am so you are price-insensitive) and there is vacation travel where you have a specific 2 week time frame in which to book your airfare (so it is in the middle between being totally discretionary and price insensitive).</p>
<p>With restaurants, it’s the same thing. Sometimes you want a cheap steak dinner and are willing to shop around for it; other times you are taking out clients and you don’t really care how much it costs.</p>
I’m addressing the fact that some colleges can meet very little of the demand for them, while other colleges have room for most if not all of their applicants.</p>
<p>My main question is: how much is it due to some colleges simply being better than others and how much is it due to perception of quality – and for the ways in which some colleges are genuinely superior, why don’t the inferior colleges improve themselves?</p>
<p>The restaurant analogy serves to compare and contrast it to an industry that either doesn’t suffer from that problem or only suffers from it minimally, and maybe to reveal incompetences and mistakes that could be corrected to reduce the problem of scarcity.</p>
<p>Or maybe the restaurant industry really does suffer from that problem in ways I haven’t looked at.</p>
<p>Agreed. It is a flawed analogy to compare choosing a restaurant with choosing a college.</p>
<p>A restaurant outing is something that one can do inexpensively repeatedly. If you pick a dud for a restaurant, you risk ~$50 meal (0.1% of the median family income) and 2 hours. Next weekend you try another restaurant. If the dud restaurant improves during the year, you might be game to give it another try. </p>
<p>**A college education is a mega-expensive one-off<a href=“transfers,%20notwithstanding”>/B</a>. If you pick a dud or poor fit for a college, you risk ~$200k (400% of the median family income) and 4 years. The day after graduation you face the consequences to your lifetime earning potential, your chances of getting into a grad/professional school, your perceived value in the dating/marriage market. </p>
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<p>The perception of quality projects the aura of greater skill/competence. That is why real estate agents will pick up their clients in a BMW instead of a Volkswagon.</p>
<p>@Classof2015, I already qualified my airline industry explanation w distinctions for leisure (on your own dime) and business (on the company’s dime).</p>
<p>The reason I chose a restaurant as an analogy is because it is a business with a limited ability to serve patrons and the potential to be under, at, or over capacity. But people who want to eat out and can afford a fancy restaurant can typically find a very enjoyable place to eat. Fancy restaurants don’t usually turn people away in the same way that fancy colleges often turn away most of their applicants and even hire professionals to streamline that process.</p>
<p>In fine dining, if there is demand, it will be met. Do colleges similarly meet the demand for education that would be challenging and profitable to intelligent, hard-working students and do applicants just not realize that? Or is there a genuine shortage of colleges that would be satisfactory to applicants if they knew what they were looking for?</p>
<p>The restaurant analogy is flawed because restaurant ratings/reviews are rather different from college rankings (which drive demand). Restaurants get good reviews when they provide a quality dining experience. College rankings are not, however, based on providing a quality educational experience. Ranking publications don’t just visit the college, sample its offerings, and rank based on their experience. They use a range of criteria that have the virtue of being easily quantified, but do not necessarily correlate with the quality of the educational experience. Chief among these criteria are the grades and test scores of incoming students, the acceptance rate, and yield. Colleges that want to increase demand for their product cannot simply offer a better product. They have to compete for top performing students to make their product appear better by driving up their numbers. They are, in fact, in a bit of a catch 22, because they could get more customers by lowering their admissions standards and admitting more students, but that would drive down their stats and possibly affect demand in future years. Unlike restaurants, colleges are evaluated (at least in part) based on their customer base rather than their product. Or, to be fair, one might say that for colleges, the customer base IS a big part of the product (because so many think that being surrounded by top performing students makes for a better education).</p>
Huge difference, yes. How does that affect the competitiveness of a college with other colleges?</p>
<p>If your choice of college has such long-term effects, and there are more people able and willing to pay a lot of money for colleges satisfactory to them than there are spots available at satisfactory colleges…</p>
<p>Why don’t more colleges step up to the plate? Figure out what people want and offer it (because it’s obvious they’re not getting what they want)?</p>
<p>Would they be able to do that if people went to college many times in their lives at a low cost instead of once (or very few times) at a huge cost?</p>
<p>Given the choice of spending $50k for college and getting the choice of:</p>
<p>Good education
or
Good education with prestige </p>
<p>People will always prefer the latter because they will be getting more value for the money. </p>
<p>Prestige is not something colleges can just go out and get. A lot of colleges try to cultivate prestige via marketing and upping their profile in the USNWR rankings.</p>
That’s probably the most fundamental factor affecting colleges’ ability to meet demand: inability to meet demand makes it inherently attractive.</p>
<p>What if Harvard cloned itself once (cloning its current students… but they’ll graduate some day)? Which Harvard would people prefer? If one of them happens to get more applicants and have a lower acceptance rate in one year, would that cascade into one of them being ranked significantly higher than the other?</p>
<p>What if it cloned itself 20 times? Then there would be room at “Harvard” for everyone who applied in 2012. Would people be less likely to apply to any of the clones because now anyone can get into “Harvard” and they won’t necessarily be surrounded by the nation’s best students anymore?</p>
<p>At the very least, we know this indicates a flaw in the restaurant analogy because if a fancy restaurant cloned itself, they would be equally appealing.</p>
<p>Is a college education in some ways more like a baseball card than a meal?</p>