HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: It’s not just people on the right complaining, as this from The New Republic demonstrates: Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League: The nation’s top colleges are turning our kids into zombies. “Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it. . . . There are exceptions, kids who insist, against all odds, on trying to get a real education. But their experience tends to make them feel like freaks. One student told me that a friend of hers had left Yale because she found the school ‘stifling to the parts of yourself that you’d call a soul.'”

The Ivy League’s position appears unassailable, but it ultimately depends on prestige, and that can evaporate quickly, leaving you with an overpriced product that doesn’t sell nearly as well without the prestige.