One gentleman wrote in with a litany of complaints and personal criticisms. Below is a copy of this e-mail, with his comments in quotes and my responses in italics.
“You need to change the name of your blog. You keep referencing the Ivy League when you didn’t even attend an Ivy League university. You’re lucky the Ivy League hasn’t sued you for libel yet.”
You’re right, I didn’t attend an Ivy, but this blog isn’t just about me, and no other phrase is so quickly and readily associated with top-ranked schools. Many people refer loosely (albeit erroneously) to roughly the top 15-20 universities as the “Ivy League,” and for lack of a better term, I’m doing the same. I suppose I could call it the “The Ivy-and-Ivy-Equivalent Lie,” but somehow that just doesn’t roll off the tongue quite so well.
As for the accusation of libel: Last time I checked, our great nation still has something called the First Amendment. For me personally, college sucked, and I have every right to say what I please about my own experiences. As far as more general statements are concerned, it’s not libel unless it’s patently and demonstrably untrue, and there are plenty of articles cited on this blog to back up the assertions I’ve made.
“You made the wrong choice of school to attend. You should’ve went to Yale or MIT. Duke is a great school, but in reality, its national reputation doesn’t come close to Yale or MIT’s. Regardless of the rankings, Duke is better known for its sports teams than for academics.”
Maybe. In my experience, the perception of any given school is heavily dependent on where you are and what job you’re applying for. On the East Coast, Duke seems to be very well-regarded, and to be known for having students were not only bright but also more well-rounded than some of their Ivy League counterparts. Duke has slipped a bit in the ratings the last decade – when I started there it was tied for 4th with Stanford and MIT – whereas now it’s hovering around #8 in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. Regardless, it’s consistently a Top -10 university, so I disagree that there’s a very substantial difference between Duke and say, Columbia or Princeton. And personally, I disagree that I would be better off had I attended Yale or MIT. The key problems for me would have applied at any of these universities – namely, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life, the tuition was exorbitant, and the coursework was painfully difficult and utterly irrelevant to any profession. If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t even apply for any of those schools, let alone consider attending one of them.
“It’s your responsibility to choose the classes that you take and choose what you major in. Don’t complain that you didn’t leave the school with the correct skill set because of your own choices. Real Ivy League schools are also often very generous with their need-based aid. Most of the students that attend real Ivy League schools don’t pay the full retail price listed on the school’s website. It’s really inaccurate to say these schools are so much more expensive than other universities. You’re only comparing the full retail price and not what the average student actually ends up paying.”
Students do bear a lot of responsibility for their success or failure in college and beyond. However, universities are also responsible for helping their students to be successful, so it’s a two-way street. It’s not at all fair or reasonable to expect that an immature and professionally inexperienced 18-year-old should know exactly what he/she wants to study or do professionally, or to have any realistic perspective of the professional world, let alone any understanding of how to succeed in it. Far too many students take out massive loans and sign up for a private-school education in the belief that they will be better off for it in the end, but then flounder because they haven’t really figured out what to study yet, and piss away an astronomical amount of money in the process. If “top” universities are genuinely excellent, they ought to do everything in their power to ensure that their students don’t end up failing, which includes providing practical and realistic perspectives on what to expect after college… But from what I’ve observed, that frequently doesn’t happen, and students are left to their own devices, meaning they’re forced to make big decisions in a vacuum – and potentially suffer the consequences later – without having any way of knowing that they were making a bad decision in the first place.
As for the financial cost, I am indeed looking at the full price of tuition. Universities vary greatly in terms of their financial generosity, and while some students may get full-ride scholarships, most of them end up paying full (or nearly full) price and are often forced to take out substantial loans to do so. Unlike public schools, private universities are for-profit institutions, and since they aren’t funded by taxpayer dollars, they must rely purely on the tuition and donations of students and alumni. Most top-ranked universities also have multibillion-dollar endowments, so they must be turning a substantial profit, which means most students are paying through the nose for their educations. Personally, I think I serve as a pretty good financial reference point for the average student, as I came from a single-income, middle-class family, and I couldn’t qualify for any need-based financial aid. Of course, there are scholarships for academic excellence as well, but most of those are available irrespective of what school you attend, and most are for a flat amount which will carry you much further at a typical public university.
“I do not personally know any Ivy League graduates that were unable to find a good job. If you are truly one of the best and brightest that society has to offer, there should’ve been a job available for you somewhere. Perhaps you should try and take more responsibility for your own failures.”
Do you know any Ivy League graduates at all? I know several dozen personally who have struggled to make ends meet, or couldn’t find any application for their degree and were forced to go back to school, often at a much lower-ranked state university, either because they couldn’t afford the loans for another private-school degree, or because they were disillusioned with their private-school experience. The various links on my blog reference dozens more grads who wound up in the same boat – and it’s not as though every unemployed Ivy Leaguer winds up with his name in the news, so you can rest assured that there are plenty more who are just as desperate but haven’t attracted the attention of the media. The reality is that not all top-tier graduates are successful, and my observation has been that most of the ones who fail are too sheepish and embarrassed to admit it publicly.
As for me: I don’t claim that I did everything right in college. I made plenty of mistakes, but I’m not a failure in general. Today, I am a successful software consultant at a company based in Silicon Valley. I make excellent money and I get to travel the world in the process. Today, I fashion I’m a decent writer, photographer, and linguist as well. I am vastly more prosperous and content now than I was before, but I owe none of it to my Duke degree or to any of the pre-college “gifted” programs I attended at Stanford and Princeton. My success has come late, and my attempt to get ahead by way of intensive academics proved instead to be a massive setback in terms of time, money, social skills, and general contentment. My present success is the result of a massive personal investment of time and effort in the development of practical vocational skills, all of which happened only after I graduated, and took place entirely outside of any academic environment. What brought me success was NOT the liberal-arts education offered (and touted) by most private schools, but the antithesis thereof.
The ultimate purpose of this blog is not to denigrate universities arbitrarily, but rather to offer an alternative perspective and encourage students to consider other options which may prove to be just as effective for building the foundation of a successful future, but at a much lower financial, emotional, and psychological cost. In the end, my goal is to help people make better decisions and to avoid making what could well be a catastrophic choice purely out of ignorance and naïveté. This is something my academic advisors never did for me, and I paid the price. It sickens me to see this happening to other people, and I want to put an end to it. My cause is as noble as any can be.
In closing, I offer the following study, which found that students who were smart enough to be admitted to Harvard were equally successful regardless of whether they actually chose to attend Harvard or not. This demonstrates firstly that success is more a reflection of personal character more than of one’s choice of school. Secondly, it goes to show that what you study is more important than where you study it – so why bother with an Ivy (or any private school, for that matter), when there are plenty of reasons not to? There is nothing I’ve achieved up to this point that couldn’t have been done with a basic public-school education, and I firmly believe that the same applies for anyone else.
“Revisiting the Value of Elite Colleges”
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/revisiting-the-value-of-elite-colleges/?_r=0
Cheers,
Clayton
The Ivy Lie 
Although I had a very positive undergrad experience at an Ivy, by no means do I think the Ivies and their equally elite non-Ivy counterparts are infallible, and I think you make a very good case for pulling back the curtain and not getting blinded by the glare of ‘prestige.’
I may be splitting hairs here, but just to clarify, ‘private university’ does not mean ‘for profit university.’ For profit universities are ones like DeVry, University of Phoenix, ITT Tech, etc. Generally speaking, though, most private colleges and universities, including the Ivies and their equivalents, are considered 501(c)3 non-profit organizations, which, among other things, gives them tax exempt status.
This doesn’t mean that private universities aren’t profitable; as you know, many of the big name elite schools have endowments in the billions of dollars. What distinguishes a non-profit organization/university from a for-profit institution is not how much revenue and income they are able to generate, but how they may distribute that income. When a for-profit corporations makes a profit, they can pay out those profits to owners and shareholders. Non-profit groups, on the other hand, cannot pay out profits to anyone within the organization; any profit made must be put back into the organization or otherwise devoted to carrying out the tax-exempt purpose (here, education) of the organization.