Some of the nation’s most important companies did not exist a generation ago, and many of the most important – Amazon.com, Google, Apple, Costco, Home Depot, Microsoft, FedEx – did not exist 50 years ago. The federal government has also been transformed over the last century, with the creation of Social Security, Medicare, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the modern Federal Reserve and dozens of other agencies and programs.

The roster of major American universities, on the other hand, is largely unchanged.

The top universities often considered the youngest – the University of Chicago and Stanford – started in the 1890s. Even colleges with the word “new” in their name don’t quite qualify. The New College of Florida opened in 1960, making it older than the first Walmart store. The New School, in New York (1919), has been around longer than universal women’s suffrage (1920).

One problem that stems from the relatively unchanged nature of higher education is its geography. The country looks very different from the way it did 100 years ago, but the distribution of our leading universities still has 19th-century echoes.



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The country’s most selective 236 colleges – colleges that tend to have more resources and much higher graduation rates than others – are especially concentrated in New England and, to a lesser extent, the mid-Atlantic. The Midwest, Southeast and California have fewer such colleges than the Northeast, but still noticeably more than Florida and Texas. The Mountain West has just a handful.

Massachusetts, home to 6.6 million people, has 22 of the country’s 236 most selective colleges, as defined by Barron’s, based on test scores and grades; Arizona, nearly identical in population to Massachusetts, has not a single one of the 236. Texas has roughly four times as many people as Massachusetts — but only half as many selective colleges. Or consider that Florida has more than five times as many residents as Connecticut but one fewer such college. A complete list of states appears below.

This pattern has real consequences for teenagers. All else equal, students who live near a college are more likely to attend college, research by David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, has found. And students who live near a selective college are more likely to attend a selective college.

Because students who attend a selective college are more likely to graduate than similar students who attend a community college or nonselective four-year college, the geographic dispersion of colleges creates winners and losers. Students who live near selective colleges benefit – and those who do not pay a price. The economy also pays a price, because so many talented teenagers, many of them in smaller metropolitan areas in the Sun Belt and Mountain West, fall far short of their potential.

What might change the situation? Philanthropists in Birmingham, Miami, Oklahoma City, Phoenix or Salt Lake City might one day decide to follow the path of the 19th-century donors who founded Stanford and the University of Chicago. Less grandly, giving information about selective colleges to students who live far from any one of them seems as if it can encourage more to apply, according to a large recent experiment. Perhaps even more important, a rising new group of digitally focused colleges – though still highly uneven in quality – have the potential to make a difference.

I’m willing to predict that higher education will change more over the coming century than it did over the last century.