Kruse Kronicle

Is There Real Competition Between Universities?

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by

mwkruse
in ,

David Leonhardt writes:

…If someone asked your grandparents 50 years ago to name the country’s best colleges, they would have come up with a list that looks very much like the list you’d come up with today. Can you think of any other industry in which that’s the case?

Or go back only to 1983, the year the U.S. News college rankings began, and compare the stability in that ranking with the turnover in the Fortune 500 since then. The top of the 1983 Fortune 500 is filled with companies that don’t exist today (Texaco, Nabisco, Beatrice) or that have been humbled (General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Xerox). See Tyler Cowen for more on this point.

It’s hard to look at this picture and conclude that higher education is a bastion of intense competition. …

Interesting point.

Comments

One response to “Is There Real Competition Between Universities?”

  1. ceemac Avatar
    ceemac

    I’ll comment before I read the full article.
    Comparing a list of elite or “luxury” colleges to the fortune 500 is a bit of an apples to oranges thing. It would make more sense to compare the college list with changes in the lists of producers of luxury or very expensive items from 1983 or 50 years ago. Rolex, Jaguar, Brooks Bros etc.
    If you look just below the Ivy Type luxury schools at the top of the list I think you’d see a lot of churn over the last 50 yrs.
    For example there are quite a few Presbyterian schools that have a national rep in 2011. But in 1960 most if not all of them were good but unknown sleepy little schools that drew most of their students from Presbyterian congregations within a couple of hundred miles of their campus.

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