Today's Sunday Times reflects on the Western state of mind. The piece resonated with me, having grown up in an Eastern Ivy League town, but also having lived for seven years in three different Western states. Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's University of Idaho credentials come up (and no, this post is not about politics or Sarah Palin!):

The governor’s supporters have painted her detractors as out-of-touch elitists, blind to their own insularity and entitlements and self-regard. Behind this view lurks a feeling of injustice rooted in another difference between East and West, the feeling that access to a particular kind of prestige and power is still off-limits to much of the country, to graduates of the University of Idaho, like Ms. Palin, rather than to those who went to Columbia and Harvard, where Mr. Obama got his degrees.

The University of Idaho is a bad choice to illustrate this point, and in fact I disagree with the idea that an elite education is "off-limits to much of the country," speaking geographically. While the University of Idaho may be a Tier 3 school, Western states also have top-rate schools that compete with Ivy League schools. Leaving out California, which has nine of the top 50 ranked schools, you still have other Top 50 schools like Rice, the University of Washington and UT Austin. If you include the Midwestern states, you can count elite schools like the University of Chicago, Washington University in St. Louis, Northwestern, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. These universities can open doors of "prestige and power", in particular admission to elite professional schools (it's amazing how many politicians made some of their most important contacts in law school). The University of Idaho is not representative of the best education "much of the country" has to offer (although UI is a perfectly fine school - not elite, but not substandard either). The idea that the East has a monopoly on elite education is a myth.