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In another presentation he offers a critical perspective on education. In particular, he notes that ostensibly, the current education paradigm is a form of indeterminate pessimism, where a degree serves as an insurance policy against an uncertain-but-probably-not-good future. However, he suggests that more fundamentally education has become a zero-sum tournament, where a diploma from a top 10 school is a golden ticket and a diploma from a low-ranked institution is a dunce hat in disguise. The material taught at these institutions is of course not substantially different: the value of the degree from the highly ranked school comes from a system of exclusivity and vetting.
Note that his proposition is about the education industry at large, and not about any particular individual motivation. Observationally, the insurance policy hypothesis is consistent with the advertising strategies I see, especially with lower prestige institutions.
His second hypothesis about the zero-sum tournament resonates with me. I've observed academic departments interviewing recent PhDs for Professor positions where, if your CV does not say Berkeley, Stanford, Caltech, or MIT on it, you will not be interviewed. See also Flaherty, and Kling's comments on this phenomena.
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