Very eye-opening. The author's basic premise is that elite education disincentivizes good teaching and intellectual rigor while perpetuating privilege.

I'm in agreement here, but I disagree with his proposed solutions. He suggests fixing the problem is just a matter of having colleges refuse to coordinate with US news and world reports, and for students to opt out of the system by going to mid-level liberal arts colleges. It's not a realistic solution for colleges and students to just stop buying into the process. It was frustrating that he implied that doing so would be easy.

I also disagree with his strong focus on the humanities. Certainly humanities are important, but his implication was that if everyone was just an English major, we'd all be more human and moral. Exposure to philosophy, writing, ambiguity and intellectual rigor are all very important, but can happen in any field. He implies that small English classes are the solution, really small anything classes are the solution.

Finally, I think he undervalues how elite universities teach students to lean on networking. He writes this off as "teaching students how to be wealthy" or as entitlement and privilege. I agree that that graduating from a Harvard, Yale, or Princeton and reaching out to another alumni for a job looks and feels like cheating. But these schools don't just put you into a network, they teach you how to build networks. They teach you to reach out to folks you know for help and use those folks to get to other folks until you get to the place where you need to be. That's a really useful skill, and while it allows folks with elite educations to get in the back door, that back door opens to anyone who knows how to use networks whether or not they have the "right pedigree."