Colleges once cultivated unique authority within culture. Even in the 80's, When I went Berkeley, I took courses with a number of people who had no just contributed to their field but had defined their field - Richard Karp who defined the P/=PN question, Lofti Zodi who defined fuzzy logic and so-forth. This kind of thing indeed certainly defined class as well.

Today, that is lost, with or without the loss of university proper. With US incomes skewed more than ever before, I'm not sure if we've lost the class part.