Sending Your Kid to Harvard: What It Buys

This morning, another NPR story about student loans and the diddling of Congress and the effect of the availability of these loans on college tuitions.  
Apparently, the existence of Stafford grants has prompted colleges to raise tuitions, knowing that students can now use that available money--much as when patients were no longer paying out of pocket for medical services, physicians raised their fees and started making much more money because now the patients had health insurance to cover the costs.


Of course, parents in the upper income brackets now believe the best thing they can do for their kids is to get them into an elite college and pay for that four years. 


All this reminds me of some people we met--the father went to Harvard and went on to make millions in publishing and the mother went to Smith. They had two sons, one of whom got into Harvard, but the other was rejected and had to "settle" for Swarthmore. 
The father went ballistic: He has contributed over $35,000 a year to Harvard and he damn well thought his son ought to have a place at Harvard for that kind of tangible loyalty. The son, eventually, got into Harvard, where, from all reports, he was miserable, but ultimately, after some time off, graduated. 


When the father asked me where my son was going to college, I said "NYU," and he smiled smugly and said, "Oh, he'll have fun there."


And I thought, I sure hope so. It's not Harvard, of course, but he just might have a chance to learn something.  Actually, I think my son did learn something at NYU. We were talking about something and I was trying to make a point and my son remarked, "Oh, that's just Freud, of course. Civilization and Its Discontents." As part of his four years, they read a core of significant works--Freud, Kant, Thoreau, GB Shaw, the Iliad--and he apparently could see when some line of thought was derivative.


I don't know what happened to the sons who went to Harvard, but I wonder whether they were propelled into the upper 1% as their father expected. 


From what I see in New Hampshire, that would not happen here. You can tell people here you went to Harvard and they say, "Oh, that's nice. Now what do you want to do about this problem at hand?"  


I suspect the value of a brand name diploma from Harvard, Yale or Princeton is getting limited to a smaller and smaller circle of people who recognize that as a glittering prize which merits you special treatment. Certainly, if you look at the classes at the most elite medical schools--Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, Duke, University of Pittsburgh, Hopkins--there are 20-30% from those brand name colleges, but the rest are from far less star lit colleges. By that token, if you have your heart set on getting into top tier medical school, you'd be smarter going to a state school or an NYU, Vanderbilt, Swarthmore. 


But what it does for the future of your kid is not what really drives these decisions--it's what it does for the bragging rights of the father and mother.