There's a question around whether people actually want a higher supply of quality institutions, or simply more access to the high-end ones that everybody is com

There's a question around whether people actually want a higher supply of quality institutions, or simply more access to the high-end ones that everybody is competing over. The latter would be self-defeating, because by definition they would no longer be elite or luxury. What would happen if suddenly hundreds of additional institutions as good as MIT, Stanford and Harvard appeared out of thin air in the US? Wouldn't we quickly revert back to the current state of things, once US News and marketers figured out a way of creating another "Top 100" hierarchy of schools, with parents shoving their kids into violin practice, water polo and building-orphanages-in-Nicaragua photo ops to make it into the new top 5 luxury brand name universities? The scarcity IS the product of these institutions. This is the nature of positional goods.