Stanford Over Harvard?

Tim,

I have my doubts that an undergraduate education at places like Stanford and the Ivies are worth the investment

I tend to agree except a college education is not about what you learn anymore. It is more about an experience and meeting people, mostly your own age. Schools like Stanford supposedly try to provide diversity so they tout this except the typical student at these schools is academically gifted and often financially well off. So they are not really diverse in a lot of ways. Read Charles Murray (Coming Apart) to see how we are becoming more and more stratified as a society in terms of education and money. And this especially plays out at the top tier universities. The academics are really more of a commodity and can be purchased in a lot of places. Except maybe engineering and some of the sciences/technical courses. Stanford's engineering and sciences are tops but there are certainly many other excellent schools in STEM subjects, especially some of the state schools. At a much cheaper cost. But you will meet a different type of person at these schools and in some ways that may be a better experience. All three of my children have made lasting friends from their college education. Neither my wife and I have many friends from college or Stanford where we met in the Business School. We have more friends from our high school years and local activities. I was a commuter to a local college and it was strictly to get a degree in something. College has become a right of passage and the education is often a side issue. Yes you get accredited but often never use the specific material again for anything. (I have an undergraduate degree in math and physics but ended up in advertising) You are challenged and the goal is to finish it well. The most obvious exceptions are in the STEM areas. (a caveat is that there has been a premium in recent years for a degree in something one can use immediately - the top paying undergraduate major is petroleum engineering) I have learned more about the world, philosophy and history after college by reading and watching video courses from the library. Online learning could change everything in terms of learning but it will not provide the experience of meeting friends and experiencing similar pressures as you struggle to complete the course work that only a brick and mortar college experience provides. I would not send my children to a school where either we are they had to borrow money to finish. That is getting harder to do with the escalating tuition fees. Hopefully, things like MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses ) will lower the cost of the education. The problem is convincing the high school student to take advantage of it, This will limit their on campus time which is what they really want so there may be resistance to it. As far as ethical and religious experience, I am not sure that is possible in many places as the faculty are mostly atheists even at the Catholic universities. So the religious who supposedly run the university have been co-opted by the faculty. The most prominent religious college educators are the Jesuits which is why I believe that a lot of the editorial material on America is affected by this relationship with a large atheistic faculty at their universities.

Thanks for this note. I didn't know what happened but you have explained it. I did edit it and I got a message that it was being moderated.