The segregation of the college system now means that the typical classroom in a third-tier public university is filled with students who are not much brighter than the average young person in the nation as a whole, whereas the typical classroom in an elite school has no one outside the top decile of cognitive talent, and many who are in the top hundredth or thousandth of the distribution. Both sets of students are technically “college educated” when they get their BAs, but that’s where the similarity stops. The cognitive pecking order of schools is apparent to everyone—to
