A general rule of thumb in life is that more expensive things are better things; the higher the price tag, the greater the quality.
As someone who has spent the past 30 years or so teaching at fairly expensive liberal arts colleges, I've always thought that this applies to higher education as well: The more expensive the school, generally the better the educational experience.
The students who graduate from expensive elite schools are assumed to have acquired a wider breadth of knowledge, superior critical reasoning skills, and the kind of intellectual curiosity that begets lifelong learning. They are, for want of a better phrase, better educated, and since that is the ultimate purpose of the enterprise, that is what also supposedly makes the extra expense worth it.
The education provided by such colleges is presumably better because the professors are more committed to teaching and advising (no teacher's aide-taught courses), the classes are smaller and the professor-student interaction therefore more extensive, and the courses more rigorous (students write lots of essays and papers and take fewer multiple-choice and true/false exams).
I'm not sure if such generalizations still hold, or hold to the same extent as they did 20 or 30 years ago, but I am still sure that the first thing parents should demand when forking over $30,000 or more per year in tuition payments is precisely the kind of superior education to justify that cost.
A second if often less appreciated reason for believing that more expensive (and more prestigious and selective) is better involves the part of the college experience that goes beyond the classroom.
It is more intellectually stimulating to eat lunch in the cafeteria or debate your friends late at night in the dorms when those you are eating with and debating are just as smart if not smarter than you are. Being a smart person surrounded by other smart people on a daily basis for four years is a lot better and life-transforming than being a smart person surrounded by people best characterized by a word that starts with the letter "d" and rhymes with "mummy."
While in college we often learn at least as much from our friends as from our textbooks and professors, so having lots of smart friends at a crucial time for your intellectual development is of almost incalculable value.
But even if those reasons--that both the education in the classroom and the intellectual stimulation outside it--justify sending your child to the most prestigious college they can get into and that you can afford, the assumption that the exorbitant cost of such places will be later made up by bigger paychecks and more rapid career advancement is challenged by a new study by Joseph Fuller and Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute.
Fuller and Hess crunch a lot of numbers and conclude: "Median salaries for graduates, four years after degree completion, appear surprisingly similar across the selectivity spectrum. Even more telling, it appears that the premium for graduating from a selective institution may have actually decreased materially over time."
What such findings suggest is that how well you do your job ultimately matters more, particularly as the years on that job accumulate, than where you got your diploma and that there is no guarantee that the long-term financial rewards that flow from acquiring a degree from the most expensive schools will come close to equaling the cost.
Also contained in the Fuller-Hess study is the implication that, if a superior education leads to superior employees, some of our most prestigious colleges are no longer providing the kind of education that produces those kinds of employees and which justify their reputations (and higher cost).
If how valuable you are to your employer is what ultimately determines your compensation, as we would expect to see in properly functioning labor markets, then there are apparently lots of employees out there who appear just as valuable as those listing Oberlin or Haverford on their resumes.
George Leef, of the increasingly indispensable Martin Center for Educational Renewal, notes that the Fuller-Hess findings are "perfectly consistent with the argument made by advocates of the 'screening' theory of higher education: What a college degree does is mainly to signal that the person might be worth hiring, not that he or she has left college with important knowledge that will be compensated for. ... Most of what a worker needs to know is learned on the job, not in the classroom, and employers won't pay much of any premium just for an impressive educational pedigree."
All of this adds up to what Leef calls the "Chivas Regal effect," wherein the increment of additional educational quality is not nearly commensurate with the additional increment of educational price.
Because college isn't for everyone, we probably send far too many young people to college who would have been better off spending their time, effort and especially money elsewhere.
But it might also be the case that lots of the young people who should and do go to college these days are also going to the wrong colleges for the wrong reasons.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.