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Comment by rbcgerard | Hacker News Reader

two thoughts

1. I think its interesting/notable that the colleges that are most successful at helping poorer kids, are not elite schools, but rather are training people for well paying "middle class" jobs like teaching them how to be an air traffic controller

2. nowhere does it talk about the cost of providing an education...if it costs College X $75,000/year/student and College Y costs $15,000/year/student then making Y "affordable" is eminently easier than X...the point being some schools may want to have a more economically diverse student body, but in order to achieve that end, they would need to either spend less on education (and consequently become less prestigious), raise more money/get more grants, or charge the students that are already paying full tuition even more...none of which appealing/easy...

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>they would need to either spend less on education (and consequently become less prestigious)

Given many studies (notably Google's) showing that school performance is not a good indicator of future performance. Is losing prestige such a bad thing? It would be if the prestige was correlated with significantly smarter and better performing graduates.

But if the prestige only comes from being associated with higher class individuals, all you are losing is a false-positive signal.

I think the conventional wisdom is that prestige allows schools to attract better students and professors, and to raise more money from alumni sort of creating a virtuous cycle...but to a certain extent its zero sum, so some schools actually end up trying to compete in races that they can't win to their detriment, and effectively to the detriment of their students.

On the first point, there's an interesting discussion to be had about what we mean by successful---for any given student, they're just as well off on average at Vaughn Aeronautic College as U Chicago (and better off at Stanford, Princeton, or MIT). However, Vaughn takes so many more low income students that their marginally lower success rate helps so many more.

As a graduate of an elite college coming in from a highly privileged background (and thus as someone trying to minimize cognitive dissonance), I do think we would lose something if we as a society only put our resources into colleges that focused on lower income students. That said, I wouldn't be too bummed if more of my tax dollars ended up in places where it was actually helping people who benefited from that help.

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