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Sen. Charles Grassley has an admirable history of looking into institutions and groups that don’t seem to be playing fair – the Internal Revenue Service, televangelists and so forth – and now he’s working to make high-priced colleges and universities more affordable.

It sounds quite reasonable at first. Nonprofit schools are exempt from paying taxes on donations to and investment income from their endowment funds, and some of those funds contain billions of dollars. “Those tax exemptions involve a social compact,” Grassley wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “In exchange, colleges are obliged to carry out the charitable purpose of providing the best education to the most students at the lowest cost.”

That’s the overall goal of the nation’s college system. However, applying that ideal to each individual school doesn’t necessarily follow.

Is every Harvard University graduate better educated than every graduate of Iowa’s state schools? Not likely.

So what are most Ivy League students paying for? They may be in the market for a fine education – and a big dose of prestige.

We owe the nation’s young people opportunities for a good education, but we don’t owe them all an equal shot at prestige. You pay extra for that, just as you pay extra to make an impression with a luxury car.

Landing college students is like finding buyers for furniture or appliances. Price points will vary.

Grassley’s spotlight might be having an effect. Harvard, Stanford University and their peers have started giving breaks to students from families with modest incomes, and that’s fine.

We would just like to point out that business legend Marvin Pomerantz graduated from the University of Iowa; Suku Radia, president of Bankers Trust Co., graduated from Iowa State University; and one Charles Grassley, powerful U.S. senator, graduated from the University of Northern Iowa.

The message to college-age students: Where you go doesn’t matter as much as what you do there.