A reader question:
Thank you for your hosting the conversation of yacht clubs. I have another question for the SWNE community. Several sites have come up with their own lists of private and public colleges and universities that they are calling "New Ivies", such as Rice University, Georgetown University, Carnegie Mellon University. Should this be a thing? What do people think? If so, what ones would make the cut?
The distinction between Ivies and non-Ivies is not relevant in the way it perhaps once was. There's not much that a student would get at an Ivy that they could not get at, say, Stanford or Chicago in terms of education and social connections. Schools that have a lower acceptance rate than Cornell include not only Stanford and Chicago but CalTech, Duke,, MIT, Northeastern, Northwestern, and Vanderbilt. And 6 out of the 10 universities in the US News rankings are non-Ivies (MIT, Stanford, CalTech, Duke, Johns Hopkins, and Northwestern), for what it's worth.
ReplyDeleteI think this is largely true. Across the top tier of research universities, faculty and students are largely interchangeable. Higher education is a commodity today, transactional in nature. What character each school has is largely retained by athletics, extracurriculars and Greek life, and the deep pockets of alumni/ae.
DeleteI recall my junior year in New Haven a rumor passed around that Colgate was to be invited to join the Ancient Eight. Later in the same month our football team hosted Colgate at the Bowl. The announcer told the crowd about the proposed inclusion of Colgate. I believe the fans are still booing and catcalling 51 years later. In the event Colgate wasn’t admitted.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that those sounding approval of the likes of Rice and Duke were themselves rejected by Yale and Harvard. Just sayin….
ReplyDeleteThe acceptance rate at Yale is 4.6% and at Rice it's a whopping 8% -- a. giant 3.4 percentage points more.
DeleteClearly, no.
ReplyDeleteAhem. Northwestern? Don’t they have a Big 10 Football team? Oh for goodness sake. My grandfather (Dartmouth ‘12) would simply snort at such a suggestion. Furthermore , what is ‘Rice’? Is that a college?
ReplyDeleteI think the missing metric here is geography. To suggest that a school in Illinois or Texas could be in the Ivy League is the equivalent of suggesting that one should host barbecue pig roasts with beer in Sconset. Please.
ReplyDeleteVanderbilt would be dead at the start for the simple reason that it is in Tennessee. Harvard and Nashville? Nope.
ReplyDeleteIgnorance is what it is.
DeleteIsn’t Georgetown Catholic? Ivy League's ethos is Protestant or at the very least agnostic, er, perhaps cynical. Can you imagine a Priest visiting Brown on a Saturday afternoon in the fall? It would be akin to an iguana visiting Channel in Paris.
ReplyDeleteGeorgetown is Jesuit, which means it counts as agnostic or maybe even atheist. I used to live near Gonzaga, also Jesuit. They didn't allow a Knights of Columbus chapter on campus, but they did have a Muslim Student Union. The religion department included a lesbian rabbi; she might have been the department chair. Opinion was divided on whether it was good or bad for the role of Judas in the campus production of "Jesus Christ Superstar" to be played by a woman.
DeleteQ: What do you call the guy who graduates last in his class at medical school?
ReplyDeleteA: Doctor
It's not the school. It's what you do in life with that degree that matters.
And what do you call that particular doctor after 10 years? Broke. There is a reason my wife and I travel 700 miles to see our doctors in Boston.
DeleteYou have that right. Although most doctors at Yale-New Haven would recommend you be treated at Harvard/MGH, because they’re Harvard grads. And most doctors at Harvard/MGH would recommend you be treated at Yale-NH, because they’re Yale grads. Either location, at any rate, is worth the trip. You may have a challenging medical situation. But at least you will know you’re being treated by the best people.
DeleteMuffy! Not this sacrilegious mumbojumbo again! How can you? To remotely even conjure Yale and Rice in the same universe is, well, traitorous. Take this post down.
ReplyDeleteLists of alt Ives have been done for years if not decades; they’re interesting and often used in college searches.
ReplyDeleteI’m a Partner at a large institutional private equity firm in NYC - I know more successful people who went to Alabama than Harvard, Yale and Princeton combined. Quite honestly the DEI priority truly did impair these institutions allure for many. A few of my colleagues have children at the Ivys and more than half regret it. One recently transferred from Harvard to UNC due to woke overreach.
ReplyDeleteMy mother went to Harvard and I have many family members who attended Dartmouth. I went to American in DC - served me well. We’ll keep our options open for our children but my sense is that it depends more on your major and engagement than school brand these days.
I think the prestige is really more regional. I'm not sure if there is one large bank outside New York that is run by an Ivy League grad.
DeleteMy grandfathers, father, uncle, brother, brother-in-law, father-in law and his brother and I all went to the same Ivy. Of course others here had relatives who went further back, etc. I and my wife (also an Ivy alum) encouraged our three children to consider other smaller colleges and universities mentioned here. They each were better students, athletes and community contributors, chose wisely, went to non-Ivies and have thrived.
DeleteI agree with your point but private equity is one of the MOST egregious when it comes to school elitism.
DeleteOn most lists of New Ivies or Little Ives the schools tend to be the sometimes overlooked but often excellent small liberal arts colleges. I believe the quality of the education at some of those schools is just as good as at the Ivy League schools. The difference is that the schools don't have the name recognition of the Ivy League schools and the students are not likely to make the connections that can help them later in life that they can make at places like Harvard and Yale. Do those schools deserve to be called New Ivies? Academically, yes. In other ways, no.
ReplyDeleteEight places in the northeast I would rather send my kids than Cornell or Penn:
DeleteAmherst
Swarthmore
Williams
Bowdoin
Middlebury
Vassar
Haverford
Trinity
I've always found the worship of a particular sports league a little strange.
I would probably lean toward Wesleyan rather than Trinity in Connecticut.
DeleteOur oldest chose Wesleyan over Harvard (my alma), Brown and Berkeley. She was very involved with the first two in improv and theater performances during her tenure and grasped she'd made the best choice for herself.
DeleteThings change. The smaller liberal arts colleges face uncertain futures. Demographics are working against them. So is the sports media hype surrounding large “D1” schools. The over emphasis in this country on sports turns many young people’s attention to the large colleges and universities in the sports news. Many of the small schools already realize they will not attract the uniformly top students they enroled in the past.
DeletePart of the reason the small schools I mentioned above (and many more great schools like them across the country) have maintained their identities and values more than much larger schools who are invested in the sports-media-complex is precisely because their attraction has little to do with sports, or anything you might see on TV. They aren't filling up high schoolers' Instagram feeds. There is no "Williams Rush."
DeleteYou apply to a place like Williams because you sought it out. Maybe your grandfather went there. Maybe one of your teachers thought you'd be a fit. Or maybe you saw that David Shipley, who walked out on Jeff Bezos and the Post yesterday, is a Williams grad, and you'd like to be that sort of person, too. No matter the reason, it was a specific reason.
Kids seek out these special places because they have a track record not only of graduating adults who stand apart, but also because they promise an education that isn't generic. Those who have kept to their values are not hurting for excellent students, and as the Big Ten Model takes over universities across the country I suspect these special little schools will only become more attractive to the best and brightest.
More relevant are the so-called "hidden Ivies," mostly smaller colleges that retain the focus on undergraduate education that the Ivies and other massive research institutions have abandoned or at least deemphasized. Places like the NESCAC schools, Colgate, Lafayette, Skidmore, Haverford, etc.
ReplyDeleteIf you are willing to be honest, the "Ivies" themselves are no longer "Ivy." Thank you, Postmodernism!!! In my midst there is a sprinkling of Ivy but a preponderance of THE University and W&L. When the swim coach from Brown phoned my younger brother in regard to swimming for his team, Little Brother was polite in his decline, mind you. But he was incredulous as to why anyone could even conceive of the idea that he would attend any school other than Virginia, much less leave the Commonwealth. Collars up!!!
ReplyDeleteDear Guestie - As a W&L boy now working at THE University, I appreciate your injecting a dash of southern pride into the conversation. I am wondering where in the Old Dominion the "midst" you reference is located.
DeleteI am a Lexingtonian, but camping out in Cville. Grandfather taught at W&L ... so forth and so on. Did you watch VA beat Wake in hoops last night? WAH - HOO - WAH !!!
DeleteMy husband is a W&L alum (class of '70). What did your grandfather teach? We live in Lexington as many of the W&L and VMI alums do. Good place to retire.
DeleteMy grandfather taught The Law at W&L. Undergrad: UVA (Raven), The College of William Mary (Law) and he designed the most beautiful English Boxwood Garden in Rockbridge County. Lexington is so wonderful; it is a benediction to live there. Go Minks !!!
DeleteA nice place but a world away from New England prep of the past or present . Apples to oranges.
DeleteGuestie - May I ask what years and specific subjects your grandfather taught at W&L? I graduated from the Law School in 1985.
DeleteTorts, Evidence, Sales and Arbitration ... but way before your time. Go Minks !!!
DeleteFormally, the Ivy League is an athletic conference formed in the fifties of like-minded, geographically-proximate institutions. Most of the schools usually mentioned are very unlikely to embrace the less professional attitude toward sports.
ReplyDeleteAn Ivy League education was superb in my day and extended far beyond the classroom or the sports fields. Having gone to Andover and been vastly over-prepared for my first year at Penn, as I settled in, I was constantly impressed by the people - fellow students and both academic and administrative staff - and the resources I could access. I received a rich and very broad undergraduate education in a historical setting in preparation for (Ivy) graduate school. It helped me learn a trade and do it well to make money. The circumspection and breadth of an undergraduate ivy education allowed me to make the most of grad school skills and maintain a steady moral and ethical grounding in my work.
I am sure many schools provide the kind of education geared for earning money just as well as the Ivies and many of the smaller schools have always been superb at doing much the same the Ivies do - Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan and Colgate among others. I am sure the "new Ivies" all have claim to excellence in many things, but I doubt it is the same in terms of intangibles like the schools' traditions, places in US history, ambiance, and, perhaps. values.
My son (Groton) did his undergraduate years at Cambridge University and got a wonderful education that really was the English analog to a US Ivy League education - no surprise as the Ivies drew so much from Oxford and Cambridge. It was a bit different but very similar at its core with respect to history, tradition, breadth of experience, resources, people. I think the similarity is found in the values and may well be closer to the Ivies than the "new Ivies" are.
But, much like Andover, Penn shared and extolled the Yankee values of my family. "From those to whom much has been given, much is expected." That is, life is about giving and not about taking. It is possible that that is or was the essential difference.
But, in the end, the formal difference as to who is and who isn't in the actual Ivy League is a philosophy about college sports, rooted in values that I think gives rise to that difference.
Penn? Is that the college with the really good football team?
DeleteFrom @10:30am: "But, much like Andover, Penn shared and extolled the Yankee values of my family. "From those to whom much has been given, much is expected." That is, life is about giving and not about taking. It is possible that that is or was the essential difference."
DeleteSounds like I should extend Penn more grace. What you describe is, to me, the essence of education, and the litmus test for institutional quality.
@Kaaterskill I sense that @10:30am was talking about the past; not sure how distant the past, but definitely the past. And given what's been happening on that campus over the last handful of years I would resist being too generous with your grace.
DeleteI would add, separately to @10:30am, that the Ivies embracing the "less professional" attitude toward sports is strictly comparative.
“For those to whom much has been given, much is expected.” Wonderful thought, but does anyone on any Ivy campus today really believe in this or any other “Yankee Value”? I think not. Now it should be: “For those to whom much has been given, be grateful that this puts you in a position to grab as much of the pie as possible, and also allows you to exclude any person who disagrees with your often radical ideas.”
DeleteThe Ivy League? Dare I say that these old schools were originally set up just for rich white boys? That’s it – nobody else - they were never intentioned to serve anyone who didn’t check their boxes, and the founders would be shocked and appalled to see what they’ve become. Disagree? Please read about the Ivie's early histories.
Yes, as with all the Ivies and over many years, there are struggles of ideas. I think that is not unexpected from bright, passionate young people who are expected to influence things. The means used are more a sign of the times, I dare say, and harken back to the late '60s. The issue is whether the institutions get it right in the end. Probably, the Ivies, including Penn, will get there.
DeleteLess professional is comparative of course, but I think less by a very wide margin.
The Ivy League is literally an athletic conference for a group of mid-sized universities that are historically academically challenging and prestigious. They still are, but there are many stellar institutions of higher education in this country. For our three children, Northwestern and U of Michigan were outstanding. They are getting the same if not better jobs and opportunities than friends who went to the Ivy League, all had great relationships with professors by making the effort to engage with them, and forged many great relationships. For the most part, people get out of college what they put into it, regardless of where they attend.
ReplyDeleteThanks. I recall many of my classmates from Yale hiring Northwestern and Michigan graduates. They were nice people.
DeleteThe five most intelligent and successful young lawyers I ever hired went to Harvard, Yale, Northwestern, Davidson, and University of New Hampshire for college. They're all partners at large law firms or sitting state or federal judges. None attended Ivy law schools. It's nice you can still recall things your Yale friends did during the Jurassic period.
DeleteI, too, was a partner in a very large law firm. We had great lawyers from Ivy League law schools and from the University of Houston.
DeleteApropos of nothing, I forsook the Ivy route for the left coast and have no regrets.
Now I live in Austin. No one follows Ivy League sports here. My brother and his Cambridge cabal do. He and his wife are Yalies.
Excellent schools around the country like Stanford, Rice, and the Claremont colleges have no interest in being called little anythings.
Ivy League football probably compares poorly to Texas high school football, let alone the several Division 1 programs in Texas.
DeleteI have fond memories of Austin. Defended a few investigations there. Between a great UT campus, excellent barbecue, the music (I'm a fan of Gary Clark Jr.), and proximity to the Hill Country, it's a very appealing place.
No matter the level of play football is a stand around sport. And the focus is as much on the spectacle and the show as it is on the action. Walter Camp is the father of American football. If he could have looked ahead and seen how football has developed he likely would have preferred for the game to feature more action. The total minutes of actual play in a football game are quite few. To a hockey fan it looks like football
Deleteis played in slow motion.
Lacrosse and soccer, likewise. I think our son (soccer outside back) was running 6-8 miles for each 90 minute game on a full field.
DeleteColleges and universities my want to be wary about associating themselves with Ivies. State and Federal actors are threatening to tax endowments substantially due to 'wokenesses' and other aspects: https://www.fa-mag.com/news/harvard-faces-new-threat-of-state-tax-on--51-billion-endowment-76805.html
ReplyDelete"Wokeness" aside, you have schools with multi-billion-dollar endowments saddling students with a lifetime of student debt. As non-profits they also have tax advantages even though they behave like money-making corporations. Few pay their fair share of local real estate taxes. Their administrative bloat has exploded; despite the surge in budgets, facilities, and administrative staff, it is harder than ever to secure a full-time teaching role.
DeleteThe Ivies are at the bottom, too, on FIRE's free speech rankings; Harvard is ranked dead last with a negative score. :-)
I think too much emphasis is put on the schools attended and teachers they have had and not on the family and upbringing. It should be instilled in the kids a love of learning and manners and not a particular school. Education is a life long interest and that extends beyond college. The education has as much to do with what happens out of the classroom. Too many people think once they receive their diploma education stops.
ReplyDeleteBeautifully stated!!!!!
DeleteGo'Cats!!
ReplyDeleteThe Kentucky Wildcats? Cool !!!
DeleteMaybe Davidson Wildcats? Cooler !!!
DeleteClass will out!
ReplyDeleteMany of the critical points have already been made. And some have set up straw men arguments between, say, Cal Tech and Dartmouth. But the really compelling question is not about this or that choice - for every CalTexh, there’s a Williams. The real question is the embedded referendum on the Ivies themselves. Anyone clinging to the Ivies does so out of nostalgia - maybe like wishing Brooks Brothers was still a reliable institution and social standard for any set of people reading this website. It’s not. Nor are the Ivies. The democratization of this particular facet of American elite credentialing has made these still perfectly fine, still elite institutions something entirely different sociologically from what the adherents above recall. The SAT and internet have too. The Yale application is just as available to some really smart kid from Topeka as it is to the legacy at Choate. These trappings are indulged today on Ivy campuses as mere quaint eccentricities. “Oh, what would grandfather say about comparing Brown and Colgate…” Please. If he spent ten minutes on Brown’s campus today, he would very likely say.”TRANSFER ME ASAP.” The Ivies are many wondrous things, good and bad. So too are the schools bandied about as Public, Little, Alt Ivies Ivies etc. But they are not bastions of an older order. Many places come much closer. Incidentally, even when the term Ivy still usefully captures many unspoken elite social connotations, Cornell was a chink in that armor. It does not take a full highball to pry that opinion from alums of the other seven..
ReplyDeleteA small dose of reality: My alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, has 51,992 students and 691 (345 men, 346 women) are scholarship athletes. Sports obviously do not dominate the school's mission, but they do draw an extraordinary amount of attention that overshadows the academic success.
ReplyDeleteAlso, keep another thing in mind: No tax dollars are spent on intercollegiate sports. All that money comes from tickets, TV and gigantic donations.
Thanks to more gigantic donations, the UT system has the 3rd largest endowment among U.S. universities, behind Harvard and Yale and ahead of Stanford and Princeton. There is a lot of crucial research going on at UT and those four other schools, and we all should be thankful for it.
Bottom line: The Ivies -- particularly Harvard, Yale and Princeton -- remain our best and make a huge contribution through research. Major state schools like UT, Michigan, Cal Berkeley and others are pretty damned good, are cheaper than the Ivies, easier to enter, and are also major sources of important research.
That is part of the problem. Most schools are known for their sports. The Ivies and some others are known for their education. You go to college for the education not to play sports.
DeletePlus UT is within walking distance of Dirty Martin's!
DeleteRe UT Austin and Harvard athletics and admission rates: Scholarships aside, 'legacy' recruited athletes at Harvard have had as much as an 80% better chance of being admitted than average applicants. Harvard and Stanford have more than forty D1 intercollegiate teams, the most in the nation. (FWIW, my Ethics tutor at Harvard went on to become a dean at UT for a career that spanned decades. He was a wonderful Scotsman who never learned to drive a car. He thoroughly enjoyed Austin weather for walking, especially after our New England winters!)
DeleteI suspect he didn't like walking during our summers. At 100 in the shade, it gets kinda hot around here.
DeleteAnd Vecchio, gimme a double OT with cheese tots please!
DeleteUT, Michigan Cal/Berkeley and others better be sources of important research. They are huge schools.
DeleteLast September, UT announced that its public health researchers had found an antibody that worked against all COVID-19 variants. Is that big enough?
DeleteExcellent. What is UT doing for us today? There are at UTAustin more than
Deletetwice the Harvard student population and plenty of money. They must be really cranking out the research. If not, maybe too much of the money is used as salaries for the assistant football coaches.
whiskeydent See my earlier post that pointed out that all the spending at UT on intercollegiate athletics come from ticket sales, media revenue, and donations to the athletic program. The UT endowment has nothing to do with the athletics, except for the large number of people who have donated to both.
DeleteWhat's more, more than a third of Harvard's operating revenue came from its endowment and was used to pay for professors, student aid, and, yes, research. https://tinyurl.com/2ppsyxaz
The irony of today’s Ivies is that they’re harder to get into but the education and experience are much worse. Harvard and Yale are not what they were 50, 30, or even 20 years ago. Most families in my circle would rather send their kids to Duke even if they would be a 5x legacy at Princeton.They’re as unrecognizable as Brooks Brothers. I also fear those who still ape over the Ivies think Brooks is “preppy, elite” fashion. Lol.
ReplyDeleteChicago used to be a big 10 school. Had a player, Jay Berwanger, on the original Heisman trophy. Taught Notre Dame how to play football. Brought in Robert Maynard Hutchins who ruined it all. "When I feel the need to exercise, I lay down until it passes." Still has the academics.
ReplyDeleteGo Maroons.
Re school reverence, and I say this not out of sour grapes, but as something who did his grad work in 02138: Harvard gave us Steve Bannon, Yale took JD Vance as aff action for Appalachia, and Ted Cruz was from Princeton - advertisements for brains, decorum and good judgment??? Nuf sed? As Malcolm Forbes wrote, "It's all one to me if a man comes from Sing Sing or Harvard. I hire the man, not his history," and one of those three fellows knows both kind of places Forbes references.
ReplyDeleteThis site is not political. There are enough places to share such political views. People go here to get away from rantings.
DeleteNo.
ReplyDeletePersonally I do not think there is any way that we can compare what the Ivy League schools were in the past to any school today.
ReplyDeleteThere are a very few people attending those schools today who are in the same social class as those who attended them several generations ago. Like it or not it is a fact. Those days are long long aside from a few rare people.
As far as a place to get a good education that’s a different story. There is an argument for that point.
My grades (#9 in my class with a 94 average) and a so-so SAT score (caused by an ass-whipping in the previous night's football game) were not high enough to get into today's UT. The racial and ethnic changes have been profound. A dramatic increase in no-debt student aid has helped more middle and working class achievers get in. As a result, there are far fewer BMW's and dim-witted sorority girls around. Now, the children of UT alums are heading off to other SEC schools. The state of Texas needs another flagship public university or two.
ReplyDeleteMight not Texas Tech and Texas A&M expand their curriculum? Would that turn them into flagship universities?
DeleteA&M is already a flagship and has its own system of smaller colleges. Like UT-Austin, it has a huge enrollment and endowment. Tech would probably be the most likely choice for a third flagship, but UT-Dallas and Texas State are also possibilities.
DeleteWould UT-Dallas and Texas State ascendency to flagship status dilute the football pool for UT-Austin? Is the ascendancy being resisted for this reason?
ReplyDeleteUT fears no one, but please keep trying to impose your negative, out-of-date stereotype. It's amusing to see prejudices exposed.
Delete