In the past few decades, the number of college-bound students has skyrocketed, and so has the number of world-class schools. The demand for an excellent education has created an ever-expanding supply of big and small campuses that provide great academics and first-rate faculties.
So says Newsweek, which procedes to list 25 top schools it calls the "New Ivies," rivaling the traditional powerhouse schools in excellence. If you're a regular reader of this blog, you might find your alma mater on that list, which includes Carnegie Mellon, Colby, Kenyon, Vanderbilt, Davidson, RPI, and my own University of Rochester.
That's good news, right? Certainly. But I'm struggling with how to reconcile this with what I hear from friends who are university professors and others recently associated with the college scene, and what I know from my own experience with American education: that the overall quality of students emerging from American high schools has plummeted. Granted, most of my professor friends are not teaching at the top-level schools, but they have contacts throughout academia, and even at the University of Rochester a professor told me that in his view the student body has only recently come back up to the quality it was in the 1970's.
My own observation is that it is harder to get a good pre-college education in America today. I'd venture to say that my father's very ordinary public school education in the 30's left him both more knowledgeable and better prepared to continue learning than today's average high school graduate. But for those who can take advantage of it, whether through private schools, home education, special public school programs, or extraordinary effort, it is possible to acquire an excellent education. Our local public school offers far more than my prestigious, Main Line Philadelphia high school did 40 years ago, though few are the ones who profit as much as they could from it.
So—whence the flood of excellent students fueling the boom in top-notch colleges? Despite the extraordinary pre-college educations achieved by some, I don't believe there are sufficient numbers of superior American students to explain the phenomenon. Take a look around the campuses of our great schools, and I think the answer stands out: foreign students. No matter how much we bemoan the state of higher education today, America's top schools are recognized as superior by many foreign countries, who send us their best and brightest students, far more so than in the past. If this competition makes it more difficult for an American student to get into Harvard, it has several salutary effects, one of which is the elevation of formerly second-tier schools.
Another benefit, and one which is probably even more important, is the greater intermingling of cultures, and the bringing together of students half a world apart, that they may get to know one another as people, as fellow-students, as us rather than an anonymous, faceless them.
