Why does Matthew Yglesias use this picture:
rather than this one:
?
It is in a good cause, however, as he calls on the Ivy League alumni of the world to give to worthier causes than their several Almae Matres:
TED and Competition: [A]s Brad DeLong likes to point out the “get a bunch of people in a room to listen to some guy talk” model of education was an organizational response to the high price of books. In principle, it would seem to have been made obsolete by the printing press and the public library. Yet obviously that didn’t happen. Colleges and universities managed to make themselves indispensable sources of credentials and social prestige... they still engage in an incredible quantity of pre-Gutenberg educating.
Which is just to say that I think there’s a need to not just let this process play out, but for alumni of the richest universities—people like Salam and Kamenetz and myself—to take some direct action... people need to be told that giving money to fancy colleges mostly seems like a big waste.... Money should be given to educational institutions... that are doing good work helping children from underprivileged backgrounds (and, no, offering generous financial aid to kids from poor families and then not admitting any doesn’t count) or else to innovative programs aimed at diffusing knowledge much more widely than a pool of several thousand undergraduates. Institutions will change when people try to force them to. People give money to non-profits in order to elevate their social status—if we change social conventions about what constitutes praiseworthy donating, then things will change.
