The Ivy Lie

A college freshman wrote to me with some questions on Ivy League schools: their merit, their policies, and their preferences. My responses follow.

1. When interviewing my head of school, who attended Penn approximately 20 years ago, he told me “no one graduated without a job”. This obviously has changed, but why do you think that is? Do you think it is the quality of Ivy League schools that has gone down?

That certainly may be part of it, but it’s not the whole story. The first question is, what do we mean by a “quality” education? What makes one school better than another? Is it the practical (i.e. professional) value of the education? The challenge it provides? Perhaps it’s the social experience, or the values the university conveys? I think it’s fair to say that there’s been a dramatic demographic, socioeconomic, and political shift in the Ivies over the past fifty or so years, but that doesn’t necessarily imply anything about the quality of the coursework. My general impression is that many elite private universities have rather academic curricula compared to their public counterparts, in the sense that they aren’t geared to train students for the “real world.” I’m not opposed to taking courses out of personal interest, but I think most students who are fresh out of high school are hoping to gain some vocational skills as part of their education, and in that respect I think many top-rated private schools don’t deliver.

2. Many students apply to Ivy schools in HOPES of that guarantee of a job waiting for them after graduation. Do you think that a student attending an Ivy vs a student attending a state school with similar grades and extra curricular activities when being interviewed for a job would have their Ivy League school name give them an edge on getting that job?

An edge? Certainly. Anything resembling a guarantee? Absolutely not. I don’t doubt that attending a school with a famous name and a top-notch reputation will help you find a job, but will the advantage you gain be significant enough to justify the expense and potentially, the extra stress? Statistically, Ivy League grads do make more money than their state-school counterparts, but those statistics rarely account for student debt and the (sometimes extreme) impact it has on the lives of private school graduates.

Aside from debt, my personal experience suggests that for all the time I spent studying, I didn’t learn much that was applicable to any profession. I’ve lost count of the job interviews in which I heard something along the lines of, “You’re obviously a very bright person, but you just don’t have the skills and experience that we’re looking for.” My argument is simply that public schools may be a better buy, may provide a healthier social experience, and may offer a more pragmatic education.

3. High school students are now going further than ever, taking extreme measures, in hopes of garnering an acceptance to Ivy League schools (ex: my cousin accepted into Harvard for this coming fall took multiple private schooling lessons and was dedicated hours to extra curricular activity, became captain of the rugby team, etc…but he was constantly very stressed out). Do you think taking these extra steps is (in a sense) only getting a taste of the stress you will receive at an Ivy?

Quite possibly, yes, although it depends heavily on your major – some courses are much easier than others. Some top universities (such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton) have become notorious for grade inflation, whereas others, such as MIT, are renowned for producing miserable students with low GPAs. I think pre-meds and engineers will likely face an intense workload regardless of what school they attend, but if you study something easy, you can probably breeze through almost anywhere.

4. When asking a family friend of his experience at Yale, he simply laughed it off and said he knew guys who attended Yale who “couldn’t tie their shoes”. He believes it was their money that got them into the prestigious school and nothing else. With your experience at an Ivy school, did you find this to be true?

While being wealthy can certainly help, my impression is that it takes a lot of money to buy your way in these days (potentially tens of millions of dollars). At Duke, there were a lot of well-off students – I remember seeing freshmen driving Porsches and Mercs – but there were a lot of poor students as well. Many top-ranked schools are “need blind,” so it certainly cannot be said that they’re financially exclusive in spite of their cost. That might have been true 50 years ago, but I don’t think it is today.

5. Outside of the obvious academic and extra curricular activities that play a role in deciding ones acceptance into an Ivy League school, what other factors do you think pay into the admittance to an Ivy? Legacy acceptance? Race? The “elite-ness” of ones high school?

Yes, yes, and yes. Statistically, both legacies and minorities get significant boosts at nearly all top-ranked schools. Caltech is the only one I can think of that adheres to a purely meritocratic admissions policy, and their demographics look quite different from most other schools of their caliber. (And Duke gives no preference to legacy applicants, but seems to be the exception to the rule.) The same preferences appear to apply to many private graduate schools as well. I remember hearing once that the best thing I could do to improve my chances of getting into medical school was “to be a gay female African-American.”

At Duke, my observation was that Jewish students were the most overrepresented, being nearly 20% of the student body (compared to 2% of the general population), and this sort of pattern can be found at most Ivies. For example, more than half of Harvard’s undergrads are now either Jewish or Asian… and I remember the year Stanford proudly published its status as the first top-ranked university to become a “majority minority” school. So if you happen to be of European descent, it’s definitely held against you in many cases. (I call this racism, but many such universities seem to think it depends on which race you belong to.)

But ethnicity, gender, religion and legacy status aren’t the only preferences – let’s not forget the athletes. At some schools, including Duke, top athletes can also gain a significant advantage over “regular” applicants.

As for high school rankings: yes, there are still so-called “feeder schools,” most of which are also private (Andover, Exeter, Hotchkiss, etc.), but I never got the impression that their students got that great an advantage. In my parents’ generation, I think the boost would have been much more significant… but then, I didn’t attend such a high school, so I may not be the best person to ask in this case. 🙂

Cheers,
Clayton