Harvard is not the problem.

Higher education has many problems, but the super selective institutions that accept less than 10% of their applicants and serve less than 1% of all college students are not top among them. 

Ana Mari Cauce is in her final months of a 10 year presidency at the University of Washington in my backyard, and in a recent interview with LearningWell Magazine, she shares that she frequently reminds the 50,000 students enrolled at UW, that “...The world is not small and private. It is big and public.”

I love this.

So why is the higher education talk-o-sphere fixated on the 10,000-plus word treatise from David Brooks on the need to dismantle the meritocracy created by ~8 small, private institutions? I’m generally a David Brooks fan, and this Atlantic piece had some interesting historical elements, but it lost me in its relentless poking at the most selective institutions. These are not the institutions that warrant our attention.

Which colleges matter the most for the future of this nation? Let’s start by looking at where the students are. 

US higher education is indeed big. Sixty percent (60%) of all college students attend an institution with 10K or more students, 78% attend an institution with more than 5K students. And US higher education is largely public, too, with 73% of all college students attending a public institution (even though only 42% of institutions are public). 

Increasingly, too, our elected officials are coming from these big public institutions (and that’s a shift). According to great reporting from the Chronicle of Higher Education this week, 40% of the members of the incoming 119th Congress have degrees from institutions with 20K or greater students. Another 30% have degrees from institutions with 5K-20K students. And the remaining 30% of members who attended small colleges still over represents the proportion of students enrolled in institutions with fewer than 5K students (22%). 

So yes, University of Washington President Cauce is correct - the (higher education) world is both big and public. 

One reason for this is that the vast majority of people stay close to home for college. For financial, logistical, or family reasons - most people attend a college within the state they are living in if not within the same metropolitan region. In the incoming Senate, 48% of Republicans and 20% of Democrats earned a degree in the state they are representing. (Chronicle) 

A recent academic study out of the Annenberg Institute looked at college attendance patterns of under-represented minorities and low-income students in Texas, finding that the mere proximity to a community college was a strong predictor of whether a student completed any postsecondary degree. These public colleges matter tremendously.

And it’s not just that most students are in large and public institutions, while somewhat obvious, most students attend colleges that are not highly selective. By their very mission, most public technical and community colleges admit almost everyone who applies; and even at the BA level - 83% of all BA-seeking undergraduates attend a college that accepts more students than it rejects (admit rate of 50% or greater).

Many philanthropists say that talent is broadly distributed, only opportunity is not. Statistically speaking then, any way you cut it, most college talent in the US is in large, public, non-selective schools. Don’t get me wrong, these institutions are not perfect by any means, nor should they be the only options out there. 

All institutions need to be transparent with and accountable for a range of student outcomes, including employment and earnings outcomes. College is just too expensive and too much of a time commitment not to know if you are going to get a positive return on your investment. The growing pressure on the sector to talk about and measure the value of a college education has legs, and it should.

And on the options front, the higher education marketplace should be just that - a marketplace with a range of schools that includes highly selective small private colleges as well as large public institutions. We also need more innovative new college models to push the sector and challenge existing norms.

In our current heightened political climate, I hope that we can focus attention more on where the students are - and 99% of them are not in the few dozen colleges that reject 90% of their applicants and seem to attract most of the media’s (and frankly often employers’) attention. 

Our future talent is in our big and public colleges. Let’s focus our scrutiny, measurement, and yes - where deserved - accolades, on them. Harvard really is not the problem.

[Enrollment stats from IPEDS 2021; Selectivity stats from College Scorecard 2020]