HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Our dangerous obsession with Harvard, Stanford and other elite universities.

It’s that time of year again, when high-school seniors receive their college acceptances and sift through financial-aid offers to pick the place where they are going to spend the next four years in college. It’s also the time when seemingly everyone involved in the college search process — from the media to school counselors — are obsessed with the admissions decisions Harvard and dozens of other selective colleges and universities have made.

Last week, Ben Casselman writing at fivethirtyeight.com and Frank Bruni in the New York Times, exposed the absurdity of our obsession with Harvard, Stanford, and the other colleges that reject most of their applicants. As Casselman rightly pointed out, just 4 percent of undergraduates in the U.S. attend institutions that accept 25 percent or less of their applicants, “and hardly any — well under 1 percent — attend schools like Harvard and Yale that accept less than 10 percent.”

[Applied to Stanford or Harvard? You probably didn’t get in. Admit rates drop, again.]

Sure, the Ivy League, along with Stanford, the University of Chicago, Duke, and a few elite public universities such as the University of Michigan, UC-Berkeley, and UNC-Chapel Hill are the pride of the American higher-education system around the world. But focusing on them in media coverage of higher education, in the halls of Congress or statehouses, and especially in guidance offices in high schools, is dangerous for our future.

Actually, what’s most dangerous to our future is the way these schools’ graduates dominate government, business, and the judiciary like never before. I say, abolish the Ivy League!