There are perhaps 50 "elite" colleges and universities among the 3,000 institutions of higher education in the United States. They are, as their brochures plainly admit, highly selec- tive; 3 out of 4 applicants for admission regularly fail to pass through the needle's eye. They are also expensive: $8,000 or more for a year in collegiate heaven. A few of them (such as the University of California at Berkeley) are public schools, the flag- ship campuses of state institutions. But most...