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<p>When Janet Evans transferred out of Stanford the reason she gave publicly was the Stanford swim coaches wouldn’t let her work out as much as she wanted - not enough mileage. But the word on the street was the real reason was that by that time Summer Sanders had arrived on the Stanford swimming scene, and there could be only one Queen Bee in the hive.</p>
<p>I’m sure that when an olympic athlete wins a gold medal, the last thing on their mind when they are on the podium is which school they want to go to.</p>
<p>^^If they are currently caught up in the same admissions madness that afflicts much of CC, I bet it’s not far from their minds even when they are on the podium. Joey Cheek started lobbying Harvard to reconsider its EA rejection of him almost from the minute he stepped off the podium with his gold medal. And much was made of Sarah Hughes’ admissions adventures as she was going through the Olympics - the media told feature stories of how she had to juggle her training with her SAT prep and how thrilled she was that she got great SAT scores and thus would probably get into a top school. And then after she won her gold medal there were more stories about how she was accepted to both Harvard and Yale but chose Yale because it was closer to her coach so she could continue her skating.</p>
<p>Thanks, Bay. Perhaps she was accepted to both but chose H.</p>
<p>I would say so.</p>
<p>This thread reminds me of an acquaintance who, at the moment his son crossed the finish first in a national championship, shouted out, “Woo hoo, he’s going to Stanford!” He did. (But he was also a 4.0 student, btw).</p>
<p>^Are you talking about Chris Derrick at NTN?</p>
<p>No, it was not Chris Derrick. Different sport and different year.</p>
<p>Sakky – I had a male neighbor a year younger than me who attended Princeton at the same time as Brooke Shields, and supposedly she was quite smart. Of course that’s all heresay and blah blah blah, but just thought I’d point that out. I think she’s probably one of the brighter actresses within the realm of actresses who were big as teens.</p>
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<p>Look, nobody is doubting that she is smarter than the average American college graduate.</p>
<p>But that’s not the question on the table, because she didn’t go to some average college. She went to Princeton. Hence, the relevant question is whether she is smart relative to Princeton’s standards.</p>
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<p>Princeton accepts you only if you can do the work. Obviously, she can do the work…she can handle the academic environment.</p>
<p>Olympic atheletes train under a rigorous training regiment. They endure many long hours and of course ppl have developed excellent time management skills as a result of it. That helps a lot when to focus on studying and work and when not to…</p>
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<p>Come on. You know that doesn’t mean much, particularly when you’re talking about a school like Princeton, for I think we can all agree that by far, the hardest part of graduating from Princeton is simply getting admitted in the first place. Once you’re in, it’s practically impossible to actually flunk out. As long as you do the bare minimum of work, you’re going to graduate. Granted, it’s hard to get top grades, but it’s not very hard at all to simply graduate. </p>
<p>Look, I’ll put it to you this way. I think we can agree that Princeton and Yale are fairly similar schools when it comes to rigor and student culture. Yet the fact is, both George Bush and John Kerry both managed to graduate from Yale, even though both have freely admitted to being highly irresponsible and unmotivated college students. Bush has freely admitted that he was just a drunk frat-boy ne’er-do-well back in those days. John Kerry admitted that he was far more interested in learning how to fly planes than he was in his studies, and he even said “I always told my Dad that D stood for Distinction.” Yet the fact is, even those guys still managed to pass and graduate. Granted, they both got mediocre grades. But they still graduated. Furthermore, this was during the days before the Vietnam-War-era college grade inflation trends that have made it even easier to graduate. </p>
<p>[FOXNews.com</a> - Self-Deprecating Bush Talks to Yale Grads - Politics | Republican Party | Democratic Party | Political Spectrum](<a href=“http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,25229,00.html]FOXNews.com”>George W. Bush | Fox News)
[Yale</a> grades portray Kerry as a lackluster student - The Boston Globe](<a href=“http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/06/07/yale_grades_portray_kerry_as_a_lackluster_student/]Yale”>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/06/07/yale_grades_portray_kerry_as_a_lackluster_student/)</p>
<p>The truth is, at schools like HYPS, you don’t need to have good time management skills in order to just graduate. In fact, you can be completely immature and lazy and still graduate. You do need strong time management skills and maturity if you actually want to do well. But to simply graduate? That’s not that hard, as Bush and Kerry both proved via their youthful immaturity and lack of motivation.</p>
<p>sakky,
I don’t think that it’s in dispute that it’s possible to graduate from a rigorous private U. What can be objected to, however, is perhaps yours (?), or certainly others’ assumption that some, most, or all celebrities – esp. if in the performing arts – are substandard academically and/or in IQ. I don’t think it’s just a common CC prejudice (and it is a CC prejudice). It is also common in the country at large: You act, dance, or skate because you can’t think. You get into an Ivy because of your talent and in spite of your (supposedly substandard) academic ability. Well, first of all, as you yourself must know, Sarah Hughes is certainly no dummy, but aside from her, there are many brilliant actors, writers, filmmakers, etc. Not just brilliant at their craft: brilliant in their intellectual insights. I don’t have information or an opinion about Brooke Shields’ capabilities in particular. I’m just talking about many actors I have read about and read of.</p>
<p>In regard to the original post:
I am sure young olympians have mch better things to think about, when they are on the podium, than getting into college.</p>
<p>First of all, Brooke Shields asked to be accepted without having to submit SAT scores. I found this article:</p>
<p>[At</a> Princeton, They Call it an Education - New York Times](<a href=“http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE1DD1030F936A2575BC0A961948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all]At”>http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE1DD1030F936A2575BC0A961948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all)</p>
<p>I recently came upon the July issue of Life magazine, which reproduces, with her permission and comment, the entire four-year academic transcript of Brooke Shields, the actress, who was graduated in June. </p>
<p>The record itself reflects nothing but credit on the young lady. She got all A’s and B’s, and obviously paid attention to her school work. None of the criticism that follows is directed at her, nor intends to suggest that there is anything wrong with the courses she took, her spheres of interest or the academic quality of the courses she did take. </p>
<p>What caught my attention was the totality of her program - that is, what it takes to get a Princeton degree these days. </p>
<p>The starting point is image. Princeton has always presented itself as the purveyor of a superior traditional liberal arts education, producing well-rounded minds stocked with the basics of Western culture. Like Harvard and Yale, the only two institutions Princetonians consider their social equals (although the Harvards have great reservations about the upstarts from New Jersey), Princeton is supposed to provide no mere ‘‘college education,’’ honorable as that is in itself. It is supposed to aspire to a level of intellectual and cultural breadth exceptional in America and suitable for a favored elite of true ‘‘gentlemen’’ (and, since going co-ed, ‘‘gentlewomen’’ in the best sense). </p>
<p>This, as I say, is the image projected. We Columbia people may have our opinions about how individual Princetonians live up to such claims, and may know from experience that their interest in their eating clubs, squash courts, genteel carousing and social contacts has often exceeded their dedication to mental development. But we haven’t questioned the devotion of the institution itself to a thorough education in the Renaissance-man sense. Until now. Brooke Shields majored in French. In four years, she took 116 credits (hours) and got an additional 16 hours of credit for individual work in her junior and senior years. To put it another way, she took 30 one-semester courses. </p>
<p>She took four courses in French language and five in French literature. She took eight courses in drama-related subjects: three in acting, three in cinema analysis, one in dance, one in contemporary English drama. These accounted for 59 percent of her classroom hours. </p>
<p>She took three semesters of ceramics (10 percent). </p>
<p>She took three courses in psychology - introduction to, abnormal and ‘‘Theories of Psychotherapy’’ (10 percent). </p>
<p>She had two other English courses - ‘‘Women and the Novel’’ and ‘‘Victorian Children’s Literature’’ (7 percent). </p>
<p>The other courses, one semester each, were ‘‘Philosophy and the Modern Mind,’’ ‘‘Comparative Family Systems’’ (sociology), ‘‘The Self in World Religions’’ and ‘‘History of Earth and Life’’ (geology). </p>
<p>I don’t doubt that the content of each course was excellent. </p>
<p>But if that adds up to a liberal arts education from a place like Princeton, there is no longer any danger that our society will ever suffer from elitism in any form. </p>
<p>That education apparently contained no courses in classical studies (history, philosophy, literature of the ancient world), medieval history, modern history or American history; no hard science (physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy) requiring any kind of lab; no math; no anthropology; no economics; no political science or government; no basic sociology; no world literature; no American literature; no geography; not even computer literacy. </p>
<p>That’s no fault of hers; by my lights, she got cheated. </p>
<p>Princeton’s motto, ‘‘Dei sub numine vignet,’’ translates from the Latin (according to a Princeton-trained classicist) as ‘‘Under God’s guidance, it flourishes,’’ with ‘‘it’’ referring to Princeton. (My freer translation is, ‘‘Boy, have we got good networking!’’) But exactly what does ‘‘flourish’’ now refer to? I am told that Princeton’s new president, Harold T. Shapiro, is a scion of the family that founded Ruby Foo’s Chinese restaurant in Montreal. Perhaps he will recognize the need for curricular menus more comprehensively constructed than ‘‘one from column A, two from column B.’’</p>
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<p>I think it’s unfair to ding them on computer literacy for the timeframe of 1983-1987; as someone who attended college in that same timeframe, no one would have known that we’d all have our own PC’s one day, and at the time, only would-be programmers needed to study computers.</p>
<p>While my school (top 20, but not Ivy) had distribution requirements (2 quarter-courses across 6 different areas), as a non-science major, I took 2 science classes geared towards non-scientists (one on genetics and one on human reproduction and development) and I don’t see what the big deal is that I never had a lab. It would have been wasted on me and for my interests, which were math, econ, and political science. And while I personally liked having distribution requirements that helped me “dabble” in courses I wouldn’t have otherwise (loved Asian art history, enjoyed North American geography), I’m not really sure that I can claim that it’s awful that a French major at Princeton didn’t have advanced math. </p>
<p>Also, Jerseymom, you may want to make clear that everything after the link is from the article, not your commentary (I at first read it as your commentary).</p>
<p>Sorry, not my commentary, everything posted above was from a New York Times article. </p>
<p>I can’t edit the post.</p>
<p>"She took three courses in psychology - introduction to, abnormal and ‘‘Theories of Psychotherapy’’ (10 percent). "</p>
<p>Maybe Tom Cruise should have taken these classes too.</p>
<p>Love your retort, collegealum. :)</p>
<p>JerseyShoreMom, I don’t know if your opening words, “First of all” were intended to signal your readers about your concurrence with the frankly snotty and grossly ignorant generalizations in the NYT article or not, regarding Princeton. It would seem that you are at least in some agreement with the know-nothings who describe themselves as “We Columbian people.” </p>
<p>Clearly, at least in terms of the author(s) of that article, apparently, at <em>Columbia</em> “they call it an education.” What amazing arrogance & ignorance is displayed in this article, on 2 counts: (1) Humanities classes are not difficult (at any fine U, by the way, a distinction which is <em>hardly</em> limited to C) and (2) Humanities majors & stupid people (and/or undereducated people) are synonymous.</p>
<p>I don’t know about the pre-1983 distribution requirements at P. I know about them more recently. You can challenge zero of them. Labs are required; difficult math is required; demanding writing ability is required, and most importantly relative to the published NYT article, the students in humanities classes are brilliant, esp. upper division.</p>
<p>So, since the Columbia writer felt free to dish out garbage, & the NYT felt free to publish such drivel, here’s my equally unsupportable stereotype of Columbia students – as accurate & up-to-date & scientific as the author’s stereotype of Princetonians: C students are full of themselves, and full of it.</p>
<p>Too late to Edit:
Negative tone of above post directed not at JSM but at any prospective poster inclined to make similar assertions based on selective associations about any particular school. (I’ve met a few particular graduates, young & not young, of Stanford & Harvard who were not all that bright, & certainly less bright than many cc posters, including self. And my point would be?)</p>
<p>…but editing my edit, lol.
Again, I’m not suggesting JSM made “similar assertions” as the article, only wondering if JSM agrees with the author’s conclusions, or whether she’s just sharing for purposes of exposing varieties of opinion. (Since she said, “not my commentary.”)</p>