More and Less

Sunday's Times front-pager about scarily dedicated students in Korea hell-bent on acceptance to Harvard, Princeton, and Yale provides fresh evidence of how the winner-take-all principle is particularly evident in higher education, especially coming on the heels of David Rockefeller's recent $100 million gift to Harvard's $35 billion endowment. There's a pretty good argument that large transfers of wealth from tremendously rich individuals to tremendously rich institutions that serve mostly rich students should be taxed by the government, not subsidized, but I imagine this won't change any time soon.

The article also shows the outsized power and value of globally-recognized brands. The fact that "going to U.S. universities has become like a huge fad in Korean society" is fundamentally similar to the mania for luxury brand names like Louis Vuitton. I think this is a problem, and I wonder if America's elite universities have really thought the implications through. Universities like Harvard are much less than luxury goods manufacturers, and much more, in important and problematic ways.

Less in the sense that they are, as currently constructed, severely limited in their ability to serve more students. They're not global concerns with the ability or inclination to do what a normal for-profit enterprise would do in similar circumstance: find ways to stamp the name on new products and services while carefully managing brand identity and the mix of exclusivity and surging demand. Universities are communities of scholars and students, bound to certain places and traditions and fragile in their own way.

More in the sense that universities serve much higher and more valuable purposes than handbag manufacturers. If Louis Vuitton mismanages the brand by diluting its value in a rush for short-term profits, or succumbs to shifting winds of fashion, then—so what? The shareholders lose money, people are stuck with ugly handbags that they paid too much for, and the world moves on.

If our great institutions of higher learning are damaged or distorted by the growing psychic weight of global demand and escalating wealth, by contrast, that would be a significant loss indeed. They say you can't be too rich or too thin, but I wonder if the time will come when Harvard and its peers decide that you can become too rich and too famous, that students, faculty, and society at large are better served by universities simply being good at what they are—no more, no less.