Taibbi had a good article on this last month: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ripping-off-young-america-the-college-loan-scandal-20130815 http://www.r

Taibbi had a good article on this last month: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ripping-off-young-america-the-college-loan-scandal-20130815 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ripping-off-young-... "Carey talks about how colleges spend a lot of energy on what he calls "gilding" – pouring money into superficial symbols of prestige, everything from new buildings to celebrity professors, as part of a "never-ending race for positional status." "What you see is that spending on education hasn't really gone up all that much," he says. "It's spending on things like buildings and administration. ." One reason they do the gilding is to increase their ranking - which itself has problems. Rankings are primarily based on selectivity and prestige, which is sort of like judging that a hospital is better because of how healthy the patients are when they get there, not how much healthier they got while they were there: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_gladwell http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_...