Need Everyone's Help! Can Someone Verify This???

juillet
Sat, 12 Dec 2015 23:31:42 +0000

This is a fallacy that I see repeated many times. But the fact that many people believe this to be true does not make it so. The Ivy League is a sports conference because of the characteristics of the member schools. In other words, they were believed to be peer institutions.

How does that make “The Ivy League is a sports conference, that’s all the designation means” a fallacy?

The Ivy League formed in 1954 because of both athletic/academic and geographic concerns. The schools were all Division I schools in the newly-formed NCAA; however, they didn’t want to compete athletically with other Div I schools that would cream them, because they didn’t have the same focus on athletics as those schools did. (There were some class-based reasons as well.)

Yes, there was a recognition of the high academic caliber of the schools at the time - and now - but it wasn’t meant to be exclusive, nor are the Ivy League schools ranked above all others as a group. That’s especially true on the graduate level, when many other public and private schools are of the same or higher caliber in certain departments. That’s what people mean when they say “the Ivy League is just an athletic conference.” It’s not a denial of the quality of these universities; rather, it’s recognition that simply being an Ivy League doesn’t make a university better than any other.

Also, a program being a revenue generator (or “cash cow”) doesn’t make it not good. Some Ivies have some of the best education schools in the country - Columbia’s Teachers College, Harvard’s GSE, and Penn’s school of education are widely recognized as top 10 schools of education (as is Vanderbilt’s, Stanford’s, Hopkins’, and Northwestern’s). Columbia has an excellent school of international and public affairs, and also a great school of social work. Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Emory, and Hopkins all have a great public health programs. Yale, Penn, Vanderbilt, Emory, and Columbia all have excellent nursing programs…I could go on, but many elite schools have very very good and well-regarded professional programs that end in terminal master’s (and that’s true of ‘academic’ programs too like English, philosophy, physics, etc.) Just because they produce money for the school doesn’t mean they aren’t good.