I don’t think breaking up their endowment is the solution to anything. What makes them a cartel is their prestige. Their prestige attracts the best students (an

I don’t think breaking up their endowment is the solution to anything. What makes them a cartel is their prestige. Their prestige attracts the best students (and the onus shouldn’t be on them to break the cartel, they have very little leverage), because the college will unlock the best careers, because recruiters (private or academic) will require those credentials, and it makes sense to require those credentials because the colleges attract the best students (so you get a better hit rate when recruiting). So it’s a cycle. I don’t think endowment funds make any significant difference. The best students don’t pick a college on the basis of the quality of their AV equipment, financing is available through other means. The quality of the education in the best colleges isn’t great either. Publishing academic papers doesn’t make a professor a good teacher. And the base curriculum is more or less the same everywhere anyway. So prestige is what holds the whole thing together. And I think the elite universities are working hard at destroying their prestige, by alienating half of the population with their political militantism, and pushing ideology over merit in their grades and recruitment. I certainly lost any respect for those institutions myself, despite having graduated from some of them, and have a policy of disregarding university names when recruiting (I typically don’t trust any credential anyway on any other line of a CV). So to me the solution is let nature and competition run their course.