Make education expensive enough, and only rich kids can get one. Not hugely surprising. Education used to be a lot cheaper and you got a lot more first generation graduates.
What you’re seeing is an entirely different effect, which is that academic hiring focuses intensely on pedigree. Professors are drawn from the ranks of a handful of elite schools: Harvard, Yale, etc. Graduates of those schools are much more likely to be elites. For example, the vast majority of law school professors went to Harvard or Yale.
Your claim is not just cause-and-effect, it's historical fact too.
Note that I already knew this, having a free ride thanks to the U.S. Pell Grants, however I DID to a basic google search. Among many other sources, this one is eye opening. Curious as to what your thoughts are:
https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-ongoi...
In case you think I'm shilling a link (I'm not, first i've seen of this), here is another:
https://res.cloudinary.com/value-penguin/image/upload/c_limi...
and one more: https://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-education/
Even being at the edge of a boomer and a millennial, I particularly love that last link.
Life in the US from 1950-2000 will one day be seen as a historical blip, not a state of being the US can ever return to. In that period, the US reaped massive profits from its position as sole industrial powerhouse for the first 20-30 years of that period (thanks to the destruction of the rest of the world's industrial capacity in WW2), and then as the world's bank for the following 20-30 years. It was a privileged position that--combined with the rise of the automobile and the opening up of cheap hinterlands for suburban development, without accounting for the externalities of course--enabled all sorts of leverage and quality of life for the working and middle classes, including massive subsidies for higher education.
Those days are over. Labor has little leverage these days, there's little exploitable land, and the middle class is more or less gone.
We could definitely decide to bring back the massive subsidies for higher ed -- after all, they're present in much of the EU. But it's not clear why one would think that heavily subsidized education would have an appreciably better effect here than it does in the EU.
For many schools, the actual cost the average student pays has not changed as much as the sticker price. One reason is that some colleges discovered they could price discriminate: by charging $XXk/yr as the sticker price, they could let in some fraction of students who can afford to pay full fare, and use that money to offer financial aid to the students they want to attract but who can't pay full fare. Another reason is that basically no college competes on being less expensive, because that might imply that they're not "worth it".
I see a lot of value in hard-science / math research. Don’t see a lot of value in yet another 80 page treatise on Proust that only 8 people will ever read.
Hopefully everything gets priced so high that the vast amounts of money wasted on universities will be greatly reduced.
So while a new research paper on some obscure subset of point-set topology may not appear to be useful today, it is possible that in the future it will be. :)
EDIT: misread your comment as "widely used", not "widely read", my bad.
But actual education and attainment of knowledge is cheaper than ever. Just YouTube alone is a massive driving factor. Or Kahn Academy.
But to benefit from things like these, you have to have a culture that values education and actively seeks it out.