The End of the Ivy League As We Know It?

Parents Forum
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<p>While there’s more great colleges out there than just the Ivy League, one must also consider that they are great colleges in their own right…despite their shortcomings and dubious alums ranging from Jeffrey Skilling to Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. </p>

<p>Even if there’s some snobbery…that gives those of us with a humorous outlook a reason to take inspiration from the following for the sake of our own amusement and free food:</p>

<p>[Horrible</a> Histories - Literally: The Viking Song - YouTube](<a href=“Horrible Histories - Literally: The Viking Song - YouTube”>Horrible Histories - Literally: The Viking Song - YouTube)</p>

<p>:D :smiley: :D</p>

<p>Seriously…most Ivy students/alums are fine people and the few snobs who are among them are either to be ignored or used for one’s own merriment at the snobs’ expense. :D</p>

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<p>Why bother with the school instead of going to the police to have the rapist arrested? (Or did you mean to say that the police department was incompetent?)</p>

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<p>Brown has no general education requirements at all: [Liberal</a> Learning at Brown](<a href=“Explore the Open Curriculum | The College | Brown University”>http://brown.edu/Administration/Dean_of_the_College/curriculum/liberal_learning)
Columbia has a core curriculum, but it has nothing specifically about ethics: [The</a> Core Curriculum](<a href=“http://www.college.columbia.edu/core/]The”>The Core Curriculum)
Cornell (College of Arts and Sciences) requires humanities and social studies courses in four of five categories, one of which is “Knowledge, Cognition & Moral Reasoning” (although a student could skip that one and take the other four): [Degree</a> Requirements](<a href=“http://as.cornell.edu/academics/degree-req.cfm]Degree”>http://as.cornell.edu/academics/degree-req.cfm)
Dartmouth has a “Thought, Meaning, Value” requirement, which may include ethics: [Distributives</a> (and commonly asked questions about them)](<a href=“Home | Undergraduate Advising and Research”>Home | Undergraduate Advising and Research)
Harvard has a requirement about ethical reasoning: [Program</a> & Policies § Program in General Education](<a href=“http://www.generaleducation.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k37826&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup87208]Program”>http://www.generaleducation.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k37826&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup87208)
Penn (College of Arts and Sciences) does not appear to have an ethics course requirement: [Structure</a> and Requirements | University of Pennsylvania - College of Arts and Sciences](<a href=“http://www.college.upenn.edu/curriculum-structure]Structure”>http://www.college.upenn.edu/curriculum-structure)
Princeton has an “Ethical Thought and Moral Values” requirement: [Undergraduate</a> Announcement<em>-</em>Undergraduate Announcement](<a href=“http://www.princeton.edu/ua/sections/11/]Undergraduate”>http://www.princeton.edu/ua/sections/11/)
Yale has requirements in the broad areas of humanities and social studies, but nothing specifically about ethics: [Distributional</a> Requirements | Yale College](<a href=“http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/distributional-requirements]Distributional”>http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/distributional-requirements)</p>

<p>Looks like three (or three and a half if you partially count Cornell) of the eight schools have an ethics course requirement.</p>

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<p>People obviously don’t know the definition of raw talent…</p>

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<p>I meant that ethics are a central part of many English and history courses (assuming they’re well taught). Of course most institutions require some sort of humanities, but from what I’ve read about many flagship’s distribution requirements, it’s relatively easy to sneak by them without ever taking a course which might incorporate ethics into the curriculum</p>

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She went to the campus police. They should have immediately referred it to the county police force, but because of how this school deals with rape cases, the campus police didn’t. For privacy reasons, I’m not going to disclose any more details about the incident.</p>

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<p>Meaning that the campus police were incompetent in this case. (And they should not need to refer to another police department, since they should be state police like the CHP, with full police powers to investigate crimes, arrest suspects, and such.)</p>

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<p>That’s curious to me whenhen. My school requires us to take an actual course in ethics at some point. As in, a full blown semester 3-credit course. There’s general ethics then a few for the different groups that need specialized ones (business majors, pre-med, pre-law, etc).</p>

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<p>Ethics really isn’t learned in a classroom.</p>

<p>Snobs are everywhere, not just ivy grads.</p>

<p>Criminals with college degrees also attend schools other than Ivies. </p>

<p>Look at the Penn State scandal.</p>

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<p>The Ivies all have a season, at one time they where the first schools of higher elite education and then the best schools for athletics and that change, then they re-branded for education only and sat back on their laurels. The reality is that most of these school were founded at a time when education was not something for the masses and hence the idea of publicly funded schools nonsense. As the US expanded other states decided that education was something for the masses and that it wasn’t worthwhile to travel to exclusive education centers,and that part of the dispute over which schools a offer superior education. </p>

<p>for what it’s worth an Accounting degree is an accounting degree now whether you chose to buy a 300K degree or 80K degree means nothing when it’s the CPA exam that sets accountants apart from one another, so given that thought it’s about making smart economic choices,and with the last couple of years of having a terrible economy many of those leaders at the helm had IVY education that just proved they are terrible decision makers,while those poor uneducated masses that managed to survive the crises have proved to economic geniuses.</p>

<p>so no the Ivies aren’t dead because, there is a preceived value and as long as there is people are going to be more than willing to pay for it,and they Ivies aren’t dummies when it comes to taking money from anyone.</p>

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<p>Look at how many private day and boarding schools there are when public education is free.</p>

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<p>Reasons for this may range from families wishing their kids to have a religious education alongside an academic one to regional historical factors.</p>

<p>On the latter, this includes the phenomenon known as “segregation academies” in which their main raison d’etre is for White families in many southern states to keep their kids separated from other races/lower SES backgrounds…even though the academic levels may not be any better and, in fact, may actually be worse than the supposedly “inferior” public schools. It was also done so those families could avoid having their real estate tax money spent on public schools…especially those with a large non-White population. The Mississippi branch of my extended family found this out the hard way after finding the local private schools were “segregation academies” with abysmal academic levels. </p>

<p>In the case of Hawaii, this was due to how for a long time in that state’s history, there wasn’t much strong support for public education among the state’s local elite who overwhelmingly sent their children off to local private schools like Iolani or Punahou or to boarding schools in the continental US.</p>

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<p>No, private schools I know of are not affiliated with any religion and they are in the NE. Some of us just believe they provide better education.</p>

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<p>I’m sure there are regional differences as well, oldfort. Here in the midwest we have great public schools (at least in my community). My kids’ large, urban school routinely leads the state in the number of NMFs and sends many students each year to top colleges including Ivies. There are very few private schools (religious or otherwise). What we do see is families leaving our district for the suburbs “because of the great schools,” which often really means “because we want to only be around other affluent white people” since the numbers don’t generally bear out their beliefs that the suburban schools are better.</p>

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<p>Tri-state area around NYC have some of the best public schools, like Millburn (Short Hills), Chatham, Madison, Princeton, just to name a few in NJ, but people still send their kids to private schools, like Lawrenceville, Pingry, Delbarton and other New England boarding schools. One of the reasons we decided to send our kids to a private school was for racial diversity because our town was very white. One of other reasons was the education was much better.</p>

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<p>That’s the same belief held by most parents in my relatives’ Mississippi area who sent their kids to private schools that were really abysmal in academic rigor. </p>

<p>However, that belief may not necessarily be true in general or even in the case of the top schools…true for all given individual students whose needs might be better served in a academically respectable public school as shown by HS classmates who came in from private K-8 day schools in the NYC area.</p>

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<p>The apparent greater preference for private schools in the northeast compared to other parts of the country did seem to exist historically. Vance Packard noted that preference in his 1959 book The Status Seekers.</p>

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<p>schoolhouse, the notion of a sharp split between “private” and “public” school is a relatively recent one, dating back a little less than 200 years. I think that all of the Ivy League colleges (and indeed most colleges of similar vintage) were significantly “public” institutions for a good deal of their history. State governments did not have the kind of robust tax base they do now, so the notion of taxpayer funding of education was not really within anyone’s conception. I know the governors of Connecticut and New Jersey still sit ex officio on the Boards of Trustees of Yale and Princeton, respectively, and I don’t think they are unique in that. Penn has historical obligations to provide free education to Philadelphia students in return for public contributions of land for its current campus.</p>

<p>A number of different things really drove the creation of public universities: First, a widespread desire for secular education, something the venerable future Ivies did not provide until much later. Second (and closely related), a widespread desire for more technical, practical education than the older universities (including some “public” ones) offered. Third, the availability of state and federal land grants to fund universities (although some of the land grants went to institutions we now consider private, including Yale, Cornell, and MIT). The rapid expansion of the country, with state and territorial legislatures anxious to create the kind of infrastructure that would attract viable, affluent settlers, thus necessitating the creation of universities where none existed already. Also, there was a great deal of interest in education reform in Europe, especially Germany, and Americans were enthusiastic about copying the great state-sponsored institutions that were being created there as part of German unification. Finally, there was an increasing movement for public secondary education, and that naturally generated a demand for more universities.</p>

<p>But in the same period when most of the main public universities were being formed, there was an incredible vogue for wealthy philanthropists (a/k/a “robber barons”) to engage in educational reform by funding newer, better institutions of higher learning. It was a trend that really began with Cornell, but continued with Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, Stanford, all of the “ITs” and “PIs”, the University of Chicago, the conversion of Trinity College (NC) to Duke . . . The first great “publics” – UVa, Michigan, Indiana, Berkeley – predated that whole generation of privates. </p>

<p>Cornell and Michigan were really key institutions of the 19th Century – the modern universities everyone wanted to copy, with their education of women, graduate departments, and introduction of focused, sometimes practical “majors” for undergraduates. HYP, etc., very much had to play catch-up with that. Harvard, though, was a great innovator in creating university-based schools of law, medicine, and education, and that very significantly increased its prestige and profile.</p>

<p>But really, even now, “public” and “private” are a continuum. Universities like Michigan and Virginia do not receive a much greater percentage of public funding than Cornell. But their boards have never been free from political control, and they have defined their mission more in terms of local students than Cornell or Harvard.</p>

<p>At the secondary school level, most of the best-known boarding schools and day schools antedate public schools considerably. While Boston Latin School is as old as Harvard, and has been “public” throughout its history, the second-oldest continuously public high school is Philadelphia’s Central High School, which was founded 200 years later. I am not certain when “free” public primary and secondary schools became the norm.</p>

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<p>JHS is correct about schools and how they came about, compulsory public schooling grew over time, it was not universal in this country. In many parts of the country it ranged from one room schoolhouses to very little at all or homeschooling, in the Antebellum south the only people who had consistent education were the children of the planter class (it varied, depended where you lived), and in other parts of the country it could be sketchy. Even prior to WWII there were many places in this country where education was rudimentary, my dad told stories during WWII of seeing a lot of guys who were illiterate, for example. </p>

<p>Someone in another post said the Ivy league schools had great reputations before USNWR was around, and that is true, but to say it isn’t about in many cases ‘prestige hounds’ is not entirely true. One of the reasons the ivies have the reputation they do is because of what they represented in past generations. Up until the post war period, the Ivy league for the most part was the bastion of the scions of the well off, they always had of course a certain percentage of scholarship students, but this was the training ground of the elite, where the Roosevelts and Roots and so forth went, and had been going back a while. It wasn’t always true, when John Adams went to Harvard it wasn’t like that, that thing happened in the 19th century as the country became more well off and there was wealth here, wealthy families. Going to an ivy was a mark of prestige, of being a gentleman, and it would be historically inaccurate to assume that at least some of that has kept up in the culture of the schools, the old boy network, the idea, propogated in what once were the bastions of the WASP elite (investment banks, certain law firms) that only 'Ivy men" were worthwhile, and so forth. </p>

<p>There is also a chicken and the egg thing here, to think about. The ivies these days attract many of the best and brightest, which in turn lends the schools to turning out successful graduates, but one of the reason the best and brightest go to the ivies is the perception that they are the best…and part of that perception is based in the past, the networks coming out of the ivies, and the idea they were elite. It is very similar in music, Juilliard is a great music school, but they also tend to get the best of the best because of their name, and with Juilliard as with the Ivies, part of that is because with the group now flooding both schools, Asians, name means everything (In China or Korea, for example, where you went to school is critical)…Music students from Asia often won’t even think of other schools, it has to be Juilliard, because of its name, even though other schools might well have better teachers on their instrument.</p>

<p>The reality in music is that going to Juilliard or Curtis doesn’t grant special benefits out in the world, that many who go there end up not in music. It is true that the level of playing to get in those schools is very, very high, but assuming someone could get in there, but chooses to go elsewhere for a great teacher, they prob have the same chances. </p>

<p>The other thing to keep in mind is that the ivies, for all their prestige, only take in and graduate a very small percentage of all students, yet there are a lot more well off and successful people then went to Ivies.</p>

<p>Ivies because they are well known offer advantages. If you are coming out looking for a job, having an ivy on a resume will help get a foot in the door with some hiring managers (there are some, believe me, who also will do the opposite), if you want to work for Goldman or other investment banks, you almost are required to come out of there. Ivies also because of the old school networks around them (that yes, date back to the WASP elite days) can help, there are still scions of the rich and powerful there…and of course they are great schools, that offer a great education, I am not disputing that.</p>

<p>But like in Music, going to those schools doesn’t guarantee success, and I think kids who could get into the Ivies are going to avoid piling on debt to go to that level of school, if they feel it isn’t worth it. Friend of my brother’s graduated as valedictorian of his engineering school class, gave up a full ride to Johns Hopkins med, to go to Harvard, because he wanted the prestige of going there, and got saddled with a mess of debt…</p>

<p>In most fields, once you are out there, where you went to school matters less and less, that ivy diploma might impress some, but when you get out there, it is what you do that matters, and I think that should be taken into consideration. </p>

<p>The ivies aren’t going anywhere, nor should they, but I think that kids are going to realize over time that the idea you have to go to an ivy to do well is a myth; Among asian kids, whose parents were immigrants coming from cultures where the name of the school means everything, when they get out there they will realize that and with their own kids, will be more likely to choose schools that fit the bill I suspect, name won’t mean as much and the same with the broad population.</p>

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<p>To go back to my first post in this thread: The Ivy League “as we know it” never existed. It was always a loose collection of excellent universities with venerable pedigrees (at least for this hemisphere) plus Cornell, the great innovator, all in the Northeast, which was where the Establishment of the mid-20th Century hung out. It never had anything like the monopoly on prestige or quality that many on CC seem to imagine.</p>

<p>When the Association of American Universities was formed at the beginning of the 20th Century, that was pretty much a guide to academic reputation of the time. The convening institutions were Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins, with Berkeley and Harvard really taking the initiative, and the first conference held at Chicago. The other charter members were Clark, Cornell, Michigan, Penn, Princeton, Stanford, Wisconsin, and Yale. So, six of the eight Ivies made up just under half this elite group. Age wasn’t a criterion, obviously, since Chicago and Stanford were only about 10 years old at the time. Brown didn’t join for another generation, and Dartmouth has never been a member. Virginia, meanwhile, was the first non-charter member admitted, and it was followed within the organization’s first decade by a raft of great midwestern public universities – Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Ohio State, Missouri. The next wave of admissions included UNC, WashU, Northwestern, McGill and Toronto, with Brown and MIT joining a few years after that. In other words, 80-100 years ago, the Ivies were all among the top American universities, but as a group they were hardly that special.</p>

<p>At the same time, at the “consumer” level, LACs were much more popular with the educated elites than they are now. My parents, children of well-to-do first-generation strivers, both went to LACs for college (Wesleyan and Mills, although the Mills choice was my mother’s rebellion against her Radcliffe Club president mother). At my WASPy prep school in the 1970s, Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth pretty much represented the pinnacle of prestige (Princeton, too, except hardly anyone went there), but places like Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, Oberlin, Wesleyan, Bowdoin, were seen as equal or greater in prestige vs. Penn, Brown, Columbia, or Cornell. My sister chose Stanford over Williams, but not without a lot of thought – no one thought it was an obvious choice at all (and if she had gotten into Dartmouth she almost certainly would have gone there over Stanford). And of course then as now the tech schools held a lot of allure for some students. My high school class sent four kids to Yale and three to Harvard, but the clear no. 2 student went to RPI (turning down MIT because it was too far away and too urban).</p>

<p>The notion that “the Ivies” had any magical aura of prestige unmatched by others would have been laughable.</p>

<p>I’ll add that my extended family were huge educational snobs (obviously), and the list my cousin the Princeton professor (and not an LAC fan) came up with in 1973 as being good enough for me consisted of HYP, Chicago, Berkeley, and Columbia, maybe Stanford. So even if you were looking at research universities, the Ivies were not an important category unto themselves.</p>

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<p>I don’t just believe, but I know the education my kids received at their private school was much better than they would have gotten at our local public school. The international school my younger one went to for the last two years of high school was inferior to the one she attended from K-10. There are people who send their kids to private schools because they are Status Seekers, and there are people who sacrifice in order to provide the best possible education for their kids. No, I don’t think Ivies or any top tier schools will disappear any time soon.</p>

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<p>That’s a regional thing though. Here, private schools are usually small. Sometimes they’re just homeschoolers who were able to get a “school” put together. Like a homescooling co-op formalized. And I don’t know of a single irreligious private in my area. Some try to hide it (the largest in my county just dropped the word “Christian” from its name) but they all are somehow church-related.</p>

<p>Granted, where I live private schooling is looked down upon. If you don’t want your kid in public school, you homeschool. And that’s usually frowned upon too unless you’re military.</p>