Not going to downvote, but I am going to disagree. For starters, most rankings have Oxford and Cambridge in the UK quite high up, and they run on a different mo

Not going to downvote, but I am going to disagree. For starters, most rankings have Oxford and Cambridge in the UK quite high up, and they run on a different model. Next up, "liberal arts" today is not the same thing as it was a generation ago, and it's debatable whether it's still doing that much except credentialism (Bryan Caplan certainly thinks it isn't). This is not, by the way, a dog-whistle at social justice: I think that college SJ is a symptom of a deeper structural problem with the current university system. The 25% who are going to fail (if the poster two levels above is right) are probably also not the Ivy League. In the UK at least, there are lots of places lower down the league tables who in my opinion could contribute a lot more to the nation if they were good trade schools rather than bad universities. Less sure about the US situation, but I think it was the case until not that long ago that there were ways to power and influence that didn't go through a university - including many examples of past presidents.