WHY IT MATTERS. At Minding the Campus, Patrick J. Deneen takes on, once again, the positional arms race for prestige colleges.

In recent years the stakes for entrance to the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities have risen to absurd heights, with students (or, their families) not only now paying significant sums for private school tuitions (or the entry cost into good school districts, namely expensive housing), SAT training, and coaching for application writing, but increasingly specialized services such as student "branding" - in which students (or, their families) hire "branding" professionals to develop a marketing strategy for "selling" a student to the top universities - and even such morally damnable practices as anonymously informing schools about the reprehensible qualities of competitors who apply to the same university. Clearly things have gotten out of control, but there are very few people - whether inside or outside the university system - who are willing or even desire to rock the boat by pointing out the absurdity of the current state of affairs.

The reason for this conspiracy of silence is that the current system benefits those who are best positioned to take advantage of the root causes for these absurdities: namely, families with the background, wherewithal and education to know how to "game" the system, and the elite colleges and universities whose denizens benefit in all sorts of financial and professional ways from their placement at these exceedingly small number of desirable schools.

Read the essay if you wish, for introspection on the grafting of new substance onto symbolic structure. I must react to that accusation of complicity in the existing hierarchy of prestige. It's really very simple. Northern Illinois is in the same business as Northwestern, or as Reed, and it ought to act accordingly. That means offering the more income-constrained or place-bound or ill-connected Illinois residents who come our way the same intellectual challenges their counterparts at the better-known U.S. News-listed universities. To do so, however, requires standards and resources. Judge for yourself. I spent some time exploring the Wesleyan site. Here is Wesleyan's economics faculty listing. Here is the Northern Illinois economics faculty directory. Our enrollment is eight times Wesleyan's, and it attends in two shifts. (And somehow our senior majors do a senior thesis, although we call it by the faddish capstone project nomenclature). Do the math.