That he calls the investment in high-end dining services “a moral problem” and implores students not to go to schools with ridiculously good food pretty much ensures people will be up in arms about this. Malcolm Gladwell is an influential writer with best sellers to his credit such as Outliers and The Tipping Point, as well as about a million New Yorker articles, so this pieces is certain to make waves. Second, it generates less revenue per student and therefore fewer resources to put into financial aid or campus amenities. A school that invests in campus amenities will draw more students willing to pay a premium price, whereas a school that skimps (relatively speaking) on amenities in favor of financial aid will be at a relative disadvantage in two ways: First, students generally prefer high-quality amenities to low-quality amenities. His logic is pretty straight forward: Schools have a budget constraint, and at the margin they can spend an additional dollar on financial aid or on campus amenities. The other is making that problem worse-and reaping rewards as a result. But one of those schools is trying hard to close the gap between rich and poor in American society-and paying a high price for its effort. Both have long traditions of academic excellence. To develop his argument, he compares two elite schools from the northeast, characterizing the situation thusly:

He claims that small liberal arts that develop gourmet-level dining services are doing so at the expense of bringing in low-income students. In his latest Revisionist History podcast, Malcolm Gladwell gives us some food for thought about where we put our resources.

An economist gets lunch