edX and MIT OCW exists. Can you get degrees? No, not other than little token certificates, but it hits the 80/20 curve on providing raw educational content. I'd

edX and MIT OCW exists. Can you get degrees? No, not other than little token certificates, but it hits the 80/20 curve on providing raw educational content. I'd would not be the first to echo the comments that the lecture material is very, very similar to other 'middle-of-the-road' universities I think that if Harvard started admitting 10x, 100x the amount of students, the issue of unequal opportunity would not go away I like to picture universities as a 4 year recruiting and networking firm with courses slipped into the mix. It makes sense for ivies to have small admittance numbers; for better and for worse. They have the network and connections to some of the best companies out there. Your googles and goldman sachs. It's really that simple; want a "proxy" to hire someone into a highly, highly competitive investment banking role that requires intermediate financial skill but the rest of the skillset is fairly general? If you want a proxy for people with the "best" performance and to mitigate risk of hiring a bad employee, why not hire fresh grads out of the school that is the "hardest" to get into? If you admit 100x more students to Harvard, new "proxies" to hire the "best" people would arise. In my armchair economist opinion Plus they would lose out on the endowment money successful students would bring in. The average expected earnings of students would dilute down. I'd be the first one to advocate they should be public in order to mandate and increase in size, but as a private university, why should they change at all? It's literally a terrible business decision Maybe I've got my priorities backwards. But as I see it, the only way to a more prosperous population is to increase the availability of desirable job roles within a country. Not increase education numbers of top schools. Increasing industry supply for high paying jobs that require education will level out the opportunity gap issue between schools How does that get accomplished? Tough to say. A problem for someone smarter than me EDIT: Politics aside, Jeb Bush recently published a pretty good op ed on how to try to kickstart an increase in skilled job opportunities in America through coordinated education planning. Linked below. He has some great points The method involving Tennessee seems like a great idea. Seems to mirror how Germany approaches education (from my understanding) https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/08/perspectives/jeb-bush-american-worker-training/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/08/perspectives/jeb-bush-america...