defend the indefensible: THE IVY LEAGUE

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

One of the funniest things I heard recently was a HS friend who went to Penn bitterly complaining about her lack of progress in the face of the 'Carleton mafia'. I reckon the grass is always greener...

Kerry, people from all over the world come to study architecture at the Bartlett School in London which is headed by Peter Cook from Archigram. As to concerns about elitism and that, fuck it, because you just have to remember that they get to meet YOU and besides you should endeavour to go somewhere really international in student intake (this is especially worthwhile in an Arch. course). Or you could apply to do architecture at the Cooper Union which is similar but free, right?

No, it's: Nobody hates Ivy League undergrads more than students who applied to, but couldn't afford, Ivy League schools as undergraduates, but who went anyway and now have no job and massive student loans.

I couldn't believe how smug my classmates were about money at Yale. The financial aid office told me that my parents should sell their house to pay my tuition. So when I graduated I had loans to the bank, to the government, to relatives. Like a mortgage with no house.

The Estimated Cost of Attendance
Tuition and fees: $28,400
Room and Board: $8,600
Books and personal expenses: $2,620
Cost for one academic year: $39,620

The one time I made an argument for class-based affirmative action in a class, I got called a racist, so maybe I should shut up.

I got nearly a full ride, but I can't imagine getting a grant that size now - it would have to be nearly three times what I got then.

Not 100% true. Brown only recently instituted a need-blind policy. It starts actually taking effect in 2007. The current undegrads are rather.. fortunate.

yeah, yer lucky trife hasn't found this thread ... (and i happen to agree with you on this issue).

Also, I realize what a great library it had - journals from 1890! Another good thing about non-state/private schools - the variety of students from all over the place, countries, cultural backgrounds, etc is great - most of my classmates were interesting and intense people. I liked being in a city having access to amazing professors.

This is actually several shades of bullshit. There were a bunch of rich kids in my class of 1600, but there were also a LARGE number of middle-class/lower-class kids as well; in fact, one of my roommates paid something like $4000 for his entire college education thanks to financial aid. Actually, something like 85% of the undergraduate population receives financial aid at one level or another (one of the benefits to having an endowment the size of a small country's GNP).

So now I'm Ivy League? I already feel snootier!

Maybe going to crappy high schools give you a disadvantage on the test, but that certainly didn't keep several people I knew who went to public schools in Florida, Arkansas or central DC schools from scoring very well and going to good Universities.

I would imagine so. In my experience, the dumbest kids at school were the richest ones - they didn't have to work to compete - they got legacies, or their daddies gave lots of money to the school. Those were the ones who sat around their dorms all day getting drunk or snorting coke.

Also, I hate to say it, but I always looked down on those kids whose parents spent all that money on test prep courses. If you're paying attention in school, you shouldn't need that stuff. I worked for admissions one year, and I saw first hand that they look for well-rounded, articulate, interesting students.

Really? Not in my experience. Being rich might make you a lot of things, but no more likely to be dumb than poor (dumb) people. I knew a lot of really smart people in college who were maddeningly rich too. In fact, almost all the people I knew at college were really smart. It was hard to find a dumb person. My roommate was a chemical abusing depressive grateful dead listening to jerk sometimes, but he also had read the Odyssey in Greek before coming to college. And he was from the South. And now is a PhD prof. at a biz school. But not rich then. It was a struggle for me to get through college, financially. But it was worth it.

And I did know a number of really dull people at college - they usually ended up in certain programs that were neither sciences nor humanities (I won't say for fear of offending anyone here who may have come out of similar programs).

It's no secret that the standards are lowered for legacy-type kids.

That tells me that the education system and admissions process are geared toward the wealthy/ier among us. Which goes back to - what's the 'good' of a need-blind admissions process?

It's better than a system that denies admission to people who come from a poor background, yes. (But isn't that system the status quo, with the emphasis on test scores and extracurriculars, etc.?) But any system that gives 3% of the spots to the bottom quarter of incomes needs to be fixed.

I'd be interested to see an SAT/ACT breakdown by class, but I don't remember their paperwork asking about family income.

I'd rather get rid of the politics that favor degrees from certain universities, but as long as they exist, I do think that these schools should admit a certain number of working-class students, so that all of Tomorrow's Leaders don't all come from the same class.

It may be that some of the people you didn't like at school, Kerry, were dull, rich, and lazy. In my experience the generalization didn't apply across the board.

You may have been sensing an affectation, a pose, that was certainly common at Yale. People who grade-grubbed and made a big fuss about how hard they worked were considered very uncool. A lot of people worked really hard, but acted rather nonchalant about their effort.

Yes, they were. It's called 'entitlement'.