<p>College enrollment is a market driven free economy model. If no one wants to go to that school, the school eventually will close. Ivy League schools are by no chance closing their doors any time sooner. If you don’t like to go, don’t, its a free world. No body is holding a gun to your head to go to ANY school.</p>
<p>Objective evidence of the failure of the Ivy League? How about the Ivy Leaguers are the ones in power and have caused our country to enter a death spiral from which we may not recover? </p>
<p>The Ivies don’t teach money is all important? Than why do so many from the League who qualify, go into investment banking? Because they want to save the world? Why do they go into Law and when they do, do they work for Big Firm corporate interests, or do they serve the poor? </p>
<p>Come on. Its all about status and prestige and how much money you have compared to your elite neighbors at that level, or if you are a professor, how much money you can make for working minimal hours per week. If you are GWB, a Yalie, sending hundreds of thousands unnecessarily to their deaths, how is this to be explained? Or a Romney (just borrow a few hundred K from your parents to start your own business Romney), who are totally out of touch with the people and seem to be devoid of morality and ethics. How does this happen to people?</p>
<p>My opinion, because an Ivy League education, where everybody is patted on the back and told how special they are, helps young students develop into narcissists with huge senses of entitlement. That is the reason Wall Street is a cesspool of crooks and manipulators, why our Congress had no problem exempting themselves from laws on insider trading, why our former President had no qualms about starting a war. The Ivy graduates have done an unparallelled amount of harm to the people in our country and across the world over the years.</p>
<p>“95% of college bound students make decisions without consulting rankings at all…”</p>
<p>Wow! And exactly where did you get that stat? There’s just no way I can believe that. </p>
<p>There is little correlation between rank and the opportunities provided by a degree from these colleges. Not only is the difference between #5 and #10 meaningless, the whole ranking system is meaningless.</p>
<p>One doesn’t need to worry about the difference of 5 points, what they need to worry about is the TRUE quality of the school. #5 and #10 might actually be ranked #75 and #150 if there was a meaningful system to truly compare schools.</p>
<p>BTW, I don’t know which schools #5 and #10 are. I’m just trying to make a point that the current ranking system arbitrarily assigns rank numbers. The system is not based on anything other than educators assumptions, opinions, preconceived notions, and biases. The survey method they use to collect this data would make most scientific method statisticians vomit. So the true difference between #5 and #10 could be quite profound and the difference between #5 and #75 could be negligible.</p>
<p>^^^^ What’s the difference. The rankers (USNWR) make money and the public buys into it. Nobody can prove the ranks inaccurate. After all, there are too many variable to attribute success or failure to any particular school.</p>
<p>hmm … the Ivies cause all the problems. Undergrad schools of these folks … </p>
<p>Ken Lay – U of Missouri
Jeffrey Skilling - SMU
Bernie Madoff – U of Alabama and Hofstra
Michael Milken - Berkeley</p>
<p>that’s all I checked so far … not looking good for the publics</p>
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<p>Absolutely true! Every person that I’ve met who attended an Ivy League school left rotting food in the office fridge, made snarky jokes if you walked out of the restroom with toilet paper stuck to the sole of your shoe, and coolly swept all of the home-baked brownies on the goodies shelf into a ziplock bag to take home for their evening bingewatching of favorite episodes of “The Sopranos” and “Breaking Bad” using their neighbor’s wifi network.</p>
<p>That parent who did a tedious 15-minute long speech extolling their kid at last week’s bar mitzvah at our synagogue, and then didn’t pay for even tuna salad for the regulars at lunch? I’m sure that was a Brown graduate. The neighbor who left their dog’s poop in our trash can AFTER trash collection? Gotta be from Penn. And the BMW driver who cut me off on yesterday’s commute, must’ve been a Princetonian. </p>
<p>:rolleyes:</p>
<p>:) 
:D</p>
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<p>I think you have made particularly clear that not only you do not know which schools are ranked 5 or 10 but also that you do not seem to know much about why they are ranked in such amanner, or how rankings work in general.</p>
<p>hmm … the anti-Ivy argument works better on the pols … </p>
<p>George Bush – Yale
Nancy Pelosi – Trinity College (DC)
John Boehner – Xavier (OH)
Barney Frank – Harvard
Ben Bernanke – Harvard
Henry Paulson - Dartmouth</p>
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<p>Yes. As a consumer, I think the overall problem with USNWR is that it is focused on inputs (especially subjective ones) rather than outputs. I am interested in such measurable factors such as student engagement (as captured in the NSSE survey), representation in research/scholarship/fellowship competitions and awards, and outcomes after graduation. I do refer to USNWR now and then, but primarily to be able to look at a lot of campus photos at a glance.</p>
<p>nolawnow— I’m sure I’m in a better position to judge what my institution teaches than you are. 60% of my high school doesn’t go to a 4 year college or any college at all. Oh no, my HS is teaching kids not to go to college!!! If the majority of ivy grads were theatre majors aspiring to be the next big thing on broadway, would ivy schools then be teaching students that money isn’t important and you should follow your dreams no matter what, even if you’re broke the rest of your life*? </p>
<p>*not saying that’s what happens to theatre majors.</p>
<p>one more … wall street guys who made a mint through the crisis … </p>
<p>Joseph Cassano (AIG) – Brooklyn College
Vikram Pandit (Citigroup) – Columbia
Robert Rubin (Citigroup)- Harvard
Ken Lewis (BofA) – Georgia State
Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan Chase) – Tufts
Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sacks) – Harvard
John G. Stumpf (Wells Fargo) – Saint Cloud State
John J. Mack (Morgan Stanley) – Duke
John Thain (Merrill Lynch) - MIT</p>
<p>Across the 3 lists only one school has more than 1 person … not looking good for Harvard … not sure it condems all the Ivies though … also didn’t track grad schools</p>
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<p>Perhaps not 95%, but a very large percentage of students just go to the local community college or heavily-commuter four year university. Even among those who go to other schools, a very large percentage of students go to those which are unranked or where ranking is low enough that it is unlikely that they chose the school with any consideration for ranking.</p>
<p>Of course, the demographic that posts on these forums is not representative of the overall college student demographic.</p>
<p>“95% of college bound students make decisions without consulting rankings at all…”</p>
<p>Wow! And exactly where did you get that stat? There’s just no way I can believe that. "</p>
<p>LOL! It’s almost like you’re unaware of a world outside upper-middle-class northeast circles. Come ON now. The majority of hs students don’t GO to fancy-schmancy colleges. They make decisions based on cost, specific major (often pre-professional), proximity to home, and whether friends will go too.</p>
<p>Hey, didn’t this thread begin with John Thain having gone to Florida State? How did he get on MIT’s ledger all of a sudden? You mean Florida State alone didn’t equip him to run ML’s Wealth Management division?</p>
<p>Don’t forget Richard Fuld, by the way, whose arrogance sank Lehman, and under whom Lehman dominated the mortgage-backed securities business. University of Colorado. And Hank Greenburg (Miami) of AIG fame.</p>
<p>I think it’s beyond bizarre to “blame” the schools for specific graduates, and I think it’s evidence of very sloppy critical thinking.</p>
<p>^^^^ the old adhominem attack for stating the facts. It doesn’t take critical thinking to see the truth.</p>
<p>I have not done this, but I suspect if I went through the list of Directors at Goldman Sachs, you would find that most of them were ivy league graduates or similar caliber schools. And Goldman is a cesspool made up of very smart people who take advantage of everybody else. Smart enough to avoid criminal indictments from their buddies in the government, getting by with paying a paltry 500M fine.</p>
<p>It doesn’t take critical thinking to recognize that ethics and morality are not significant considerations by those who lead our financial institutions or even Congress (although the average IQ of those in Congress is probably close to 100)/</p>
<p>Blame Goldman culture if that’s the case. Not the colleges.</p>
<p>Goldman’s culture fed, filled and created by those brought up with a narcissistic sense of entitlement, in many respects caused or contributed to by their elite educations. Of this I have no doubt.</p>
<p>Everything they do, every goal they have . . is to enrich themselves at the significant expense of others. </p>
<p>Where do these people learn to be what they are if not from their elite educations and elite cohorts whom they spend all their time with?</p>
<p>That to me is the biggest danger of sending our children to elite schools. They may become those people that many of us have total contempt for.</p>
<p>What about when the colleges perpetuate and even serve as the breeding ground for the culture by ignoring the negative elements that contribute to it? For instance, when they turn a blind eye to sexism and racism and traditions of hazing that bring out the worst in people and yet foster a tight bond that continues from college to Wall Street?</p>
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<p>Hang on, didn’t this thread start with a quote about a highly successful money manager who attended FSU? I’m totally confused. Is John Thiel one of “those people” for whom we have total contempt? Or does he get a pass on being considered contemptible because he didn’t attend an elite school?</p>