<p>I just wanted to throw this out there and see your responses.
What if there was no such thing as a prestigious college--if they were all at the same level. In other words, there would be 20 Stanfords, Harvards, Princetons, ect., ect.
How would this make you feel? Would you like it? Do you think competition would increase or decrease? Would education be worse, would it advance? Less happiness? Less jobs?</p>
<p>Competition creates a healthy economy, competition is always the natural default, and even when it’s legislatively eliminated, human nature will still always be to game the system.</p>
<p>Even within any group where everyone is supposed to be treated exactly the same, a hierarchy will always form.</p>
<p>If there were 5,000 Stanfords - then Stanford would lost its standards, drastically. The reason why prestigious schools are able to maintain low acceptance rates and such is because there aren’t that many of them - if there was one on every street corner, they’d have to accept a ton of applicants - and in doing so, a lot of people, as condor14 said, would lose the incentive to work hard in school, because after all, why take a bunch of AP classes to end up going to the same exact school as the rest of your non-AP classmates?</p>
<p>If everyone’s super, no one’s super</p>
<p>Some people have trouble finding jobs with a bachelor’s degree now because more people are going to college and just have a degree doesn’t signify as much as it used to.
Elite universities have more resources and opportunities, but even now you can get a very good education at hundreds of universities…people on here are concerned with prestige primarily as a status thing rather than an academic/educational thing. People want to go to prestigious colleges because they’re hard to get into. You’re going to have competition whenever resources are limited.</p>
<p>Lot less stress</p>
<p>Of all the utopian ideas people have imagined, the greatest is that everyone in existence should have access to all the educational resources necessary to help them reach their full intellectual potential. Raising the quality of schools around the world to compete with the current best schools would be a good start, if feasible.</p>
<p>Wow. I find this thread very depressing. </p>
<p>“after all, why take a bunch of AP classes to end up going to the same exact school as the rest of your non-AP classmates?”</p>
<p>Because you’re excited about learning? Because you want to learn as much as you can in school, and you don’t want to waste your time being bored in a class where you aren’t learning much?</p>
<p>"people on here are concerned with prestige primarily as a status thing rather than an academic/educational thing. People want to go to prestigious colleges because they’re hard to get into. "</p>
<p>Or maybe you think you’ll learn more and have a better college experience at a prestigious university which has top faculty and attracts top students? Maybe you think that classes will be more rigorous and you’ll get a better education? Maybe you couldn’t care less about the status or how hard the school is to get into. Maybe you just want to learn in a community of really smart and motivated people?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Extrinsic rewards are helpful even if you care about learning. I often have trouble motivating myself to do productive things, and that’s not because I don’t care about learning…it’s because I have bad habits and my actions don’t always live up to my ideals. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I did say “people on here.” Kids on here probably requite more cynicism than kids in general. 
I really do think most people apply to prestigious colleges primarily because they’re prestigious, though. But I don’t think caring about prestige is mutually exclusive to caring about learning.</p>
<p>@halcyon, sure, extrinsic rewards, such as grades, can be motivational when it comes to studying for that test or completing that project in time. But as far as simply signing up for the AP’s? I am sure my daughter would have leaped at the chance even if she weren’t planning ever to attend college. She knows what the alternative classes are like and she was so glad to get out of classes like that. </p>
<p>as far as the OP’s question goes, I think it would be wonderful if there were lots of copies of schools on the level of the best colleges. There are thousands of qualified applicants being turned away from those schools. They still do get a chance to go to very good schools, but it would be nice if they could get the experience they wanted most. And think how much happier and less stressed students would be.</p>
<p>It’s called Europe. You seem to have all been sucked up into the idea that the prestige of the university is so vitally important. In Switzerland, for example, as long as you pass your high school exam, you can go do almost any university program. A few programs have score restrictions, like medicine, but anyone can go to ETH, for example, which is considered Europe’s MIT. There is weeding out in the first year because of the difficulty of the programs, but everyone has a shot at it, no matter what background they came from. The culture of prestigious private universities is very unique to the US, and in some ways I think the cut throat competition is hurting us because we are so focused in this rather than the content. I described applying to US colleges to my German coworkers, and they just seemed downright horrified by it.</p>