This is a good article, but it misses something important. There are dozens if not hundreds of institutions where a student can learn just as much as they learn at Harvard or Yale or similar. The actual value of these institutions comes directly from the fact that they’re populated by rich people. The entire point of choosing Harvard over, say, Georgia Tech, is that at Harvard you make rich friends, with rich parents who run rich businesses who can give you a rich job when you get out. Or grant you access to a rich spouse. Their chief function is not education, it’s networking.