Q: What is a good school? A: One that other people like

A few months ago I received a call from someone running a small private school near New York. They believed their school was objectively better than a larger, more famous establishment nearby, but had more difficulty attracting pupils. What should they do?

This is not easy. You see, however skilled your teachers are, what really makes a good school is often simply having a reputation for being good. When parents choose a school for their children, much as they pretend otherwise, they are not really choosing a school so much as buying a peer group for their offspring (and, to some extent, for themselves).

Yes, I know everyone talks about facilities and teacher-pupil ratios and so on when they talk about schools, but this is largely bullshit to maintain the pretence of rational objectivity. (Trust me, once you follow David Ogilvy’s dictum that ‘people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say’, understanding human behaviour becomes much easier.) Instinctively, people choose schools using the same social epistemology they use to choose pubs: it doesn’t matter how good the beer is if you don’t like the clientele.

This peer-group effect means that however hard you work to improve your school, people may still not choose to send their children to you, instead preferring a school they think other people think is better. The technical term for this second-order selection is a ‘Keynesian beauty contest’ and it explains how public schools and universities preserve their relative prestige for centuries. The businesses most similar to schools and universities in this respect are luxury fashion brands, where the same Keynesian feedback loop operates. It doesn’t matter which brand of sunglasses you prefer — what matters is whether other people admire them.