Once, I had faith in the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities: growing up in Middle America, they seemed from a distance like wondrous Shangri-Las of learnedness and refinement, floating far above us banal minor leaguers. And then I got into Brown, for what was a frustrating four years, and later worked for over a decade at Columbia using skills from a career in journalism to help market the university. My professional responsibilities quickly came to include delivering extra dollops of that ultra-elite sizzle, the implicit assurance that the short list of famous institutions offered the authoritative latest and greatest from the world’s best and brightest, regardless of how little was really happening intellectually on campus.

Which isn’t to say that I didn’t meet lots of smart and even brilliant people over the years — you don’t generally reach somewhere so competitive if you’re a total idiot — just nowhere near as much as advertised. The typical mode of discourse at Brown tended to sit somewhat beneath the AP courses at my Midwestern public high school, and at Columbia below even that. So what happened? How did a small clique of American institutions rise so high only to sink so far?