Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

In topsy-turvy, status-conscious America, a degree in B-B stacking from Yale has more cachet than an Engineering degree from Podunk University, and people are often hired simply because they are Ivy League graduates. This is discrimination at its most insidious, and a prime reason why higher education is failing America. It's also the major indication of America's de facto Class system: the elite prestige schools are reserved for the Nouveau Aristocracy with just a smidgen of integration of the lower classes for cover.

Lavish campuses, high tuition, and huge undergraduate debt loads have become the norm, and the competition for affluent, high-scoring students causes even second-tier schools to seek higher prestige by aping the same superficial characteristics. They spend on the things that the ranking magazine “U.S. News” measures, and pay for them via student loans which the school rankings don’t care about. But after all that, education has actually become less effective, with fewer and fewer courses taught by tenured professors, and increasing class sizes, all due to an artificial shortage of an imaginary commodity whose only value is a market distorted by prestige-seekers.

America is not alone in this, other countries are also obsessed with prestige: British students dream about getting into Oxford or Cambridge; for French students, it's the grandes écoles; South Koreans compete for the Seoul National, or Yonsei; and Japanese hope to get into Todai or Keio. Only the German higher education system seems immune to this totally destructive concept of elitism. They have no exclusive group of universities that will break your career if you cannot get in, and all that's required to attend any university is earning good grades in Secondary school. Subsequently, Germany has a more affordable education system: almost all German universities are public, with students paying only $300 per semester. And German university graduates are considered some of the best in the world. American parents & students are focusing on the wrong thing.