Coincident with Larry Summers, a new theme in the liberal elite internet echo-chamber: the general crappiness of undergraduate education at big name universities (read: Harvard) (and the comparative value of the elite liberal arts colleges, which I buy into just a little bit):
From Slate:
"If you want to impress a shopkeeper in Yemen, by all means go to Harvard. If you want the best education for the money, you might want to consider Swarthmore or Williams."From The New York Review of Books
"Under these circumstances, one might expect to see students fleeing to colleges whose sole mission is teaching undergraduates. Fine colleges such as Swarthmore, Amherst, and Williams, which have significant endowments and high academic standards, do indeed have considerable drawing power. Yet these are small and relatively fragile institutions"From The Atlantic:
"Empty seats in the various halls and auditoriums multiply as the semester rattles along, until rooms that were full for the opening lecture resemble the stadium of a losing baseball team during a meaningless late-August game. "