Ivy League Over Rated
At this very moment, all over the country and potentially the world, high school students and their parents are planning and scheming to get into an Ivy League. Young people are groomed practically from birth to be attractive to mysterious and all-powerful admissions committees guarding the gates of the eight universities that comprise the “Ivy Leagues”.
This is now so common, there is even a psychological malady known as “The Yale Syndrome”, a sort of obsession with college admission that creates an unusually proximate time horizon for a young person, the moment of college admission. Students who suffer from this affliction do not develop a plan for success in college, or in any aspect of their lives, beyond the arrival of that “fat envelope” detailing their acceptance. Oddly, they share many of the same concepts of time as terminally ill cancer patients.
Parents view admission to one of these schools as a high grade on their parenting skills, and correspondingly view rejection as a low or failing grade. There is a great gnashing of teeth about the whole endeavor. But seldom does anyone really ask the question: “Are Ivy League schools over-rated?”
How did this national obsession come about? First, let’s define what the Ivy League is. In one sense, the Ivy League is a collection of geographically proximate schools that formed a football conference in 1956. If you look at it another way, the Ivy League is a collective brand representing the pinnacle of American higher education. This is the Ivy League: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale. No other school is a member, in spite of what some alumni may claim.
The Ivy League has not been a focus of fevered longing for very long. For most of this nation’s history, college was a local endeavor. The best and the brightest did not go far to go to college. Then, a convergence of societal trends in the late part of the last century quietly nationalized education, without anyone really noticing. The advent of cheap air travel–and the breakdown of regional differences due to television and the migration of educated workers throughout the country–combined to make bright young people look nationally for college choices. So this collection of venerable schools became a focus of their attentions. The problem is that young people and their families didn’t catch on to the level of competition that this change entailed.
As college became a middle-class right instead of an upper-class privilege, a lot more students wanted in to what they perceived to be the most elite schools. One Ivy League school now rejects over 90 percent of the students who apply, and rejects over half of the students who apply with perfect SAT scores. Think about that.
That’s where we are today. Everyone in the country wants into the same handful of schools. But what do you get with an Ivy League education, especially as an undergraduate? Is it really the best in the country? These are undeniably good schools, but there are also one hundred other schools that do as good or better a job at educating undergraduates.