"I could see a good argument for making an ivy league school with an enrollment of 100k, simply to break the ivy league elitist bullshit."
The elitists would simply view that larger school as inferior.
The elitists would simply view that larger school as inferior.
They'd instantly become the Ivy League Safety School, which would deter many of the strongest future applicants from applying and deter many of their strong admits from choosing that school if they had multiple Ivy admittances.
I do think education differences would also occur. It's simply not possible to scale undergraduate lectures, recitation, labs, lecture and small group spaces, etc, by a factor of 7-20x and keep the same quality. (At a minimum, it's not possible to do so quickly/in a single step.)
* I think it's a majority of the source of their prestige, but not exclusive.
What is your understanding based on?
> For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-ma...
That’s not “education” directly, but does suggest an extremely strong applicant pool selection effect is happening.
That is interesting and surprises me: Certainly many elite jobs are available to Harvard graduates that aren't available to most others. I wonder how that fact (AFAICT) reconciles with the claim about income.
> That’s not “education” directly
Agreed - the market doesn't reward education, but how well you serve their particular corporate needs. Education isn't vocational training, especially at better schools.
The OP says Columbia is growing rapidly, yet there has been no such reaction. Who are these "elitists"? Can you cite such a reaction?
This seems to hint at the idea that larger institutions are not as prestigious:
"A serious loss of prestige for French universities : in spite of their 12% of foreign students (rank 2 in Europe after UK) , the French universities no longer attract the best students from the whole world; the recent ranking made by the University of Shanghai of the 500 best universities of the world is awful for the French national pride (the best one ranks 65th) : the good teaching and research centers are too small, and the big universities are not good enough ;"
You made the claim, so it is up to you to prove it.