The Real Difference Between Public & Private Universities

In an era when the credibility level of the public educational system has never been lower, it's a bit rich to hear educators at public universities tut-tut about the relative quality of private education. Private universities are diploma mills, say professors, that print diplomas for anyone wiling to pay - and they're right.

But public universities are, too. Public and private universities both have infinitesimal fail-out rates; many more students quit for lack of funds than for lack of skill. And by all accounts, the higher one goes in the system, the more outrageous grade inflation gets and the lower fail rates go. As the saying goes - Harvard is very hard to get into, and all but impossible to flunk out of.

The difference between public and private universities, then, isn't the quality of education. It's the relative importance of money and other personal characteristics in entrance requirements. Note that I didn't say "academic performance", I said "personal characteristics". There are other forms of social influence than money (although of course money is the pre-eminent one). People make a big deal about affirmative action and Feminism in higher education, but what those phenomena really are, is symptoms of the Balkanization of American society into mutually opposed interest groups.

Now here's where things get interesting:

The strongest correlation with personal success in American society is your parents' wealth. IQ is probably second. Education isn't a pre-eminent variable unless graded along a very compressed bell curve - i.e., the advantage of having a doctorate or JD as compared to having a HS degree.

Therefore, since private colleges are more expensive than public colleges, and the fail rate of both public and private colleges is near-zero, all other things being equal, private colleges should have a stronger correlation with life success, for the reason that attendance correlates directly with the strongest indicator for life success.

If that isn't the case, then that would seem to prove the academics' argument. Or perhaps it merely proves that private colleges are for fools from declining estates who can't leverage their family wealth more effectively. Either way, I'm sure there's some interesting statistical study there for someone more knowledgeable than I.