Why The Ivy League Is Overrated

Why is the Ivy League overrated?
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Got a "why" you want answered? Give us your questions here:

[canti-sama]

As Thomas Sowell is well known for saying, "The principal benefit of a Harvard degree is never again having to be impressed by anyone with a Harvard degree."

[concernedliberal]

Went from a very expensive IQ test to a very expensive ancestry test

[ambinintsoahasina]

I really like the fact that this is a topic that actually both the right and the left generally agree on. What misses from this is the rampant nepotism

[MerwinWren]

No one cares about grade point or which school someone went to 5 years after graduation. It's all about performance afterwards.

[grateful]

Friends I know from ivy league schools CONSTANTLY mention their ivy league affiliations. They act superior & are unreasonably arrogant & bossy.

I keep them at an arms length for good reason.

[Mrbluesky-tb]

They seem like a finishing school for sociopaths.

[josephninjas]

Ivy League = Legacy admission > Merit

[michaelshi]

The problem with these arguments is that the ivy league are only 8 universities. There are thousands of other universities not to mention other forms of education. IT is normal for there to be no ivy league representation in some fields because of how few people attend ivy league schools. In proportion to the amount of students that attends these schools they produce some of the best stats.

[b_ks]

The Ivy League is where rich people send their kids to make connections and friendships that will be useful in the future.

[johnl]

Stanford (I'm an alumnus) has been woke-captured like the rest, but still produces super exceptional talent, especially in STEM. Students from families that earn less than 100K attend free. Stanford & Cal Tech are not old enough to rely on their ancient laurels

[johnritter]

I go back to the 50s...I've been around a while. One thing I've become convinced of: not all, but most of what America is about is "overrated" ... "hyped up." A lot of it has to do with the power of advertising. To compete with the other company, you have to show (it's a cliche) that yours is "All New and Improved!!!" Thus, the same happens with college: Harvard, Yale, the Ivy League are the best!!! Hooray!!! I must get my brat in there. Americans are marketed to death...why? Because in a free country, it is legal for them to market us to death. And, as you know, they are after your children before they reach 5 years old.

[danagolden]

I'm not arguing for or against the conclusion, but the reasoning is flawed from a statistical standpoint. You shouldn't look at whether or not the majority of individuals in a particular job category are Ivy League, you should look at the probability of getting into those positions conditional on an Ivy League degree. You have to remember that P(Ivy) is very small, so even if P(lead intersect Ivy) is just 10%, P(lead|Ivy) might still be large. Also, remember that the statistical advantages potentially compound, which is why the percentages are really high at the highest levels of academia and government.

[douglasstrother]

"You come in here with a skull full of mush, and if you survive, you'll leave thinking like a lawyer." ~ "Professor Kingsfield" John Houseman's character in "The Paper Chase". (from way back when)

[robertewalt]

When my son was applying to colleges, I started to point out to him and his mother, that many colleges besides Harvard could give him an excellent education. I got so much pushback, that I stopped.

[edcew]

I'm an Ivy League graduate and took my BS off my resume 30 years ago

[terrylandess]

Anything that is overpriced for the sake of vanity is exactly that.

[HLStrickland]

They have SHOWN themselves. (sorry but...) Crap in ...crap out. MONEY for their education means NOTHING.

[catherga]

I work for one Ivy League and graduated from another. Their overhyped reputation is based on the fact that they have a ton of money and that they admit only the most incredible undergraduate students who were going to do great things even without an Ivy League education.
Ivies are good schools and have incredible resources and faculty, but state schools and minority serving institutions are kicking their butts in terms of access and impact.

[Focusembedded]

Let me address this from the viewpoint of somebody who worked his way through school to get an Ivy undergrad and two Ivy graduate degrees. The big failing of the Ivies is that even in my day (AB in 1987, two graduate degrees in 1989) people like me were becoming a rarity. When my father graduated from the same Ivy in 1961, there were a lot of middle-class kids at the school. My father was the youngest child of a military family, so he wasn't rolling in family bucks when he went in. He had a decent career with the government, but he was hardly a 1%-er. And when I went to school, he was not writing the tuition checks, I was. So my experience of college wasn't "Spring Break late season skiing at Igls" or "summer in the Hamptons." I went back to a variety of jobs that included such plum assignments as "janitor in a nursing home." I've enjoyed few films as much as _Good Will Hunting_, particularly for the bar scene where Will puts the Harvard snot in his place and the opening scene where you see Will pushing a mop as he cleans the university hallway as a night custodian.

But even by the late 1980's, middle class kids were getting squeezed out. DEI was in its infancy, but it was still driving the universities to engage in race-based admissions that watered down quality in the pool of applicants. And when these people from lower social strata arrived, they had every imaginable bit of financial help, so theirs was not the experience I had. Not one of them could tell you how many bedpans you have to empty to buy one hour of Ivy League instruction. (I did the math once. It's about 210 pans full of somebody else's turds.)

At the other end, there were the sons and daughters of the obscenely wealthy, and they were utterly divorced from any economic reality. Most also had horrible feelings of entitlement. Some turned that around when they hit the real world. Among my friends is a woman who got a transfer into my alma mater (unheard of at the time) when her father bought the university a new building. At the time, I wondered how she'd ever function. But on leaving school, she took over the reins of her father's company and has run it brilliantly ever since. So there are exceptions. But many knew that their first jobs were going to be in some corner office where they had to know about as much about the business they were in as Hunter Biden knew about energy when he got appointed to Burisma's board.

I suppose in that way, the Ivies -- which are now politically quite left of center -- followed the same trajectory as the Democratic party. They pandered to the ultra-poor, often to their eventual disadvantage. And they maintained an elite crust that became an impenetrable place where people were coronated, not educated. But they lost the blue wall. Middle-income kids like me (or my buddy from the wrong side of Minneapolis who got in based on his being a very good hockey goalie) were gradually being squeezed out.

And unfortunately, societies function best when they have healthy middle classes. The Ivies are no exception.

[sb]

It’s because they’ve become money making businesses and allowing too many people in with lower/ average grades instead of only accepting the best of the best and people with merit. For example, the Ivey school in my city used to have only 100 spots each year. Then they built an enormous new building allowing 1000 students to enrol; thus, now it’s about filling the spots with those who will pay and not about the 100 best students who actually earned their spot by hard work and perseverance! I also think that the quality of the education one receives has plummeted and the “degrees” they offer are useless!