We're still creating a meritocratic elite, based on capacity limit and price of admission. Not everybody get to have an elite education, or afford such an opportunity.
Ideally, high quality education would be democratized and made accessible to anyone who want it regardless of their means to pay.
And University of Nebraska, and University of Wisconsin Maddison, and Texas A&M, and Ohio State, and many others.
It seems like you based what you said on some vague notion of prestige, but if you look at the courses offered/required, the topics covered, and the books used of any of the schools I listed, you’ll see it’s effectively the same education as Harvard and the rest.
Unless you think there’s something magical about the professors at Harvard that enables them to teach undergraduate classes far better than professors at state schools, there’s no reason to assume the classes are any higher quality.
The word merit doesn't stretch so far as to include mediocre children of wealthy parents. You are welcome to call it an elite education. But the whole point of the word "merit" is to distinguish it from mere parental wealth and connections.
Bingo. At this point, you can acquire a better education on most topics through self-directed free routes like that as long as you're motivated. Or for some areas there are things like bootcamps, the best of which teach the actually marketable skills much better than colleges.
I'd argue that college ceased being primarily about education a long time ago. College in my humble opinion is:
• Place to rub shoulders with elites (mostly only applies at Ivies, or at prominent schools within certain niches probably)
• Proving you have sufficient grit and responsibility to endure adversity and get things done - or more accurately, some in society are willing to use it as a decent filter to exclude those who are lazy and unmotivated. Notably, this has a high false-negative rate, meaning lots of hardworking, motivated people don't attend or graduate from college due to money, time, cultural expectations of their social group, etc.
• Least important: A filter to exclude people who apparently can't be taught. Has the same false negative problem, some fall through here because their schooling sucked and they didn't learn how to learn.
Only that first aspect is really related to whether minorities need a boost or legacies need to be brought to an even playing field. Education itself is easy to get at many schools, and is often better than these fancy 'research schools.'
That's fine and all, but self directed education is a skill in itself in that you need to be able to figure out how to teach oneself and troubleshoot when you're stuck in addition to cultivating a mindset and habits. This is a thing not taught broadly to people, or otherwise well known. It is an entire topic in itself that people write entire books about it.
For sure, there are ton of folks who self taught themselves programming and other skills, which seems to occur mostly be an accident.
There's also the time component. You can learn a lot really fast if you can spend a year without needing to be paid, which is really not possible to achieve unless you're already wealthy.
Totally agree with everything you are saying here. I just don't have a great deal of faith that college actually moves the needle that much on what gets learned, for at least a significant portion of the people who attend.
Ideally, high quality education would be democratized and made accessible to anyone who want it regardless of their means to pay.