Imagine a bookstore that only accepted 5% of customers. If you want to buy a book, you need to fill out an application showing how well-read you are and how likely you are to use the knowledge from the book to advance your career. Every bookstore implements this system, and they become more popular the more people they turn away. Furthermore, bookstores have no reason to build additional locations even when they are filled to capacity, because they only want the most intelligent, well-read people to buy from them. No top-tier bookstore can deviate from this system, because it would cause their rankings (which are inverse to acceptance rates) to plummet. Many bookstores reinvent the wheel, investing in effectively equivalent resources and then limiting access so that no one but a small few can pay to access it.
This is bad for the bookstore, because they don't make a lot of money and have to charge more to each customer. This is bad for customers, because most of them don't get the chance to read, and when they do, the price is extremely high. In this case, much of the curriculum is an artificially scarce resource, because it could hypothetically be offered to everyone online without raising expenses significantly. Yet all the best authors and best publishers work for bookstores with the lowest acceptance rates, since those have the most money. Only the bookstores with low acceptance rates have money, because they have the best authors and publishers.
This is how college works in the United States. While not everyone can have the prestige that currently comes with attending a top-tier university, it's hypothetically possible for everyone to receive a Harvard-quality education via the internet. So what if every university were forced, by law, to offer certifications (online or in-person) to everyone who applied? (Not for free, of course.) Not everyone must attend in-person classes, but all lectures must be recorded, and everyone must be allowed to get some form of degree. And if a government decree is too much, then universities that don't comply receive a harsh tax penalty.
If universities are given some time to comply, with increasing tax incentives by year, what would happen? With many times more customers and relatively stable expenses, I expect prices would become very low at top universities. Colleges would need to be ranked somehow, but with acceptance rates out the window, this would have to be based on how much students improve over the course of their studies at the university. Students would need to be ranked too, but with everyone allowed to attend any university they want, this would need to be based on performance, or some third-party offering standardized exams.
The point is this: everyone can have access to the top professors and best lectures in the country for much cheaper. The best colleges can collect money from more people and invest in more resources. Instead of 1,000 different colleges giving the same lecture, we'd have about a dozen giving different lectures at a much lower price for each student. And as for ranking colleges and students? The market will find a way as it usually does.
If this is the most efficient way, why hasn't the market forced the top colleges to do this? Prestige, ill-executed non-profit ventures, and so-far ineffective government intervention. Get rid of the obsession with status, and we'll have a more educated populace.
