True, Harvard, Yale, UCLA etc are tops, but do you know the costs of entering such schools assuming that you have the grades to enter. You will spend quite a substantial portion of your working life paying back the school fees. As a whole regionally accredited universities do have certain level of proficiency but the standards of education is dropping and can be easily seen, just ask a new computer grad to write a "Hello World" program and you will be surprised how many flunked. I have interviewed so many that I wonder how they passed their computer science courses in the first place.
There are still a lot of respected Universities. In fact, we still recieve a huge number of foreign students who come here to recieve higher education. I'm sure our public high schools are not quite as high ranking.
Again, my example is anecdotal, but I agree with this. I've helped people with programming problems before that supposedly had four year CS degrees from just an average college. I'm self taught and my head was left spinning at how little some of these graduates actually know. And to think that employers will actually give them a job over me because they have an "education". The criticisms of our educational system is warranted. It's the unthoughtful stereotypical stuff that bothers me.
Anyone notice in those spelling bees, geography bees, etc, even though home schooled children represent a very small minority of America, many place high in contests? tom