A supposedly serious article on Ivy League colleges; but there's not one reference to the cruciality of students wearing shirts with the correct length button down collars, dirty bucks, natural shoulders etc. There's not one bit of advice about whether loafers should be worn with cuff trousers or any other insider stuff that might make all the difference to a students education.

Shallow lazy journalism at its worst.

Thanks.

Just an all around lack of rigor, standards, students sitting in class for the sole reason of ultimately making more money, etc...  I'd imagine these are phenomena lamented by plenty of others in the American academic arena.  I agree with what he says about students getting out of their education what they put into it and how the students' battle of intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation is a crucial aspect of the current academic environment.

It is clear to me that I would never get into the school I went to today. Besides the fact that the admission rate is 1/4 of what it was when I went, I just was not impressive outside of academic ability. Never was a leader and never had any interest in being one. Never wanted to serve anyone. Club life left me cold. Networking is too cynical and semi-social in an anti-social way for me. I have no abilities that stand out besides reading comprehension and the ability to remember nearly everything I read. Instead of admitting a learning machine like me, an achievement, goal-oriented robot would get the nod.

And my school has changed. I don't want to make value judgments, but it is entirely different now. Most popular majors: Economics, General; Biology/Biological Sciences, General; International Relations and Affairs; Engineering, General; and Neuroscience. I read something awhile back from the President that nearly half of all undergraduate students were involved in life science concentrations of some type. Now here is the shocking thing: this is Brown.

JFC, can anyone have foreseen that 20 years ago, let alone 50? Brown is cranking out pre-meds, business students, and engineers and not polymaths, philosophers, and readers.  Did we not go to Brown so that we could avoid taking math and science classes? There is no doubt today I would go to St. John's (the one in Annapolis/Santa Fe...not Queens), or Hampshire, which were two of my other choices. As a practical matter I would have to choose one of them; as I said, there's no way I would get into Professor Carberry's school today. And as a matter of preference, I think I'd feel much more at home somewhere else.

I cannot speak for Yale. Maybe Stan or Bill can. I don't know if they've changed so much or not. (They are still the gay Ivy, right? Not that there's anything wrong with that).

/\  ha ha Jeff Reed ... we thought the place in Cambridge was the gayest Ivy by far  ... anyway the Yale of my day was co-ed and there were many cute, smart preppy women about to frolic with and that's all I know about that ... as far as I can remember the lines were more drawn along grinds versus partiers, freaks versus straights, preps versus public schoolers ....

one of the nicest things about that place was how friendly we were to each other generally, it amazes me today .....

Just about everybody there had perfect test scores and GPAs or lots of money, and many had both, it was very hard to get in then too, all the admissions officers from the colleges would work out admissions offers with the college counselors at the high schools and decide who was getting in where, and a lot of it had to do with being a legacy or a development project .... and how you looked, believe it or not .... they'd find out where your parents and grandparents went and urge you to go there ... your father would always have a friend who would tell you that Williams or Dartmouth was better than the school your relative had gone to and you should really consider it .....

then your girlfriend would start talking about Stanford and you would mention that to your parents and they would say absolutely no California, had to be East Coast ....

meanwhile you'd go on a college tour and get to spend a weekend at your first-choice school with your brother or cousin or friend who was a year or two older ... you'd show up on Friday, they'd get you faced on Friday night, take you out drinking and to a mixer, you'd get toasted and would be eating cheesesteaks at four in the morning, next day you'd be at breakfast looking at the girls, then you'd go to the football game, have a fun time, pass out, get up, drink and get sick and have a blast stomping around on Saturday night, and on Sunday you'd limp to the train station or get driven back to school and you'd be psyched to party with those dudes next year.  This would only be changed by getting involved with a smart girl who would make you take things more seriously grades-wise.  When I think of what we did to my little brother when he came to visit us to see if he wanted to go it makes me laugh ... poor kid ... of course he followed me there, they let him in and that was how I knew that I hadn't really been as out of control as I thought I'd been ..... 

if you could amass legacy status, perfect scores and GPAs, awards, athletic achievement, and popularity, and you genuinely loved books, you were going to get in someplace good ..... it was not encouraged to apply to all of the Ivy schools, just to a few favorites ..... speaking for myself, my safety schools were also Ivies ..... heh heh  ....

for many of us it was a foregone conclusion that we'd be going to a particular school, mainly because it was a family school and the preference for admitting children and relatives of  alumni was/is strong.  I was lucky and had a choice of multiple Ivy and Little Ivy schools to choose from (track star), and I am so glad I went to Yale so I could hang all those years at Toad's Place, Pepe's, Sally's, Louis Lunch, Yankee Doodle, J. Press, the Co-Op, Rudy's, the Anchor Bar, Park Street Subs, Quality Wine Shop, the Yankee Doodle, Naples Pizza, Bulldog Pizza, Modern Apizza, Tony & Lucille's, and Ashley's Ice Cream, and Cutler's Records, and Rhymes Records, and Mamoun's ..... and play in Payne Whitney and take classes in Linsly-Chit and Weir Hall and all the other beautiful buildings with my profs ... I wish I could have just one more meeting with almost all of them, to show them how I kept up with the reading over the years and to thank them ....

my major was the most laid-back, multi-disciplinary one offered there and mainly I just read hundreds of works of fiction for years ... it was fun, it was what I was good at, and I was well-prepared for what came next ....

as far as the writer's proposition that Ivy League students don't have lofty ambitions, that's absolute nonsense and every single issue of the alumni magazine is full of the brilliance of the current and former students and faculty, it's really heartening in a world full of grimness .....

I went to College of Charleston because the girl : guy ratio was astronomical. That's what led to my emotional well being.

... I could have been the starting quarterback at Vassar .....

Bwahaha, objectify me all you want ladies.