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There's a level of service that we could provide when we're just at Harvard that we can't provide for all of the colleges, and there's a level of service that we can provide when we're a college network that we wouldn't be able to provide if we went to other types of things.

I don't think I could have thought of any place other than Stanford to leave Harvard for.

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest of the Ivy League are worthy institutions, to be sure, but they're not known for educating large numbers of poor young people.

To go to USC without a scholarship is next to impossible.

There's a reasonable amount of traction in college education, particularly engineering, because quite a lot of that is privatized, so there is an incentive to set up new colleges of reasonably high quality.

If the Ivy League was the breeding ground for the elites of the American Century, Stanford is the farm system for Silicon Valley.

Access to a college degree is critical.

I have observed private and proprietary colleges, like the University of Phoenix, and the market they serve. And I found it intriguing the way in which they are trying to deliver the product, with more accountability, for a price.

It's fashionable with the Sarah Palin set to attack Harvard and treat its graduates as elitists. But if you spend any time on campus, you see students drawn from all over the world - an astonishing number these days with roots in Asia - whose chief assets are brainpower and hard work.