Is the Ivy League "Worth It"? ..
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Is the Ivy League "Worth It"?
by Donald Asher
Right now, all over the country, high school students and their parents are scheming to get into the Ivy League. Young people are groomed practically from birth to be attractive to mysterious and all-powerful admissions committees guarding the gates of the eight universities that comprise the Ivies. Articles and books are written on packaging strategies, which classes and activities are "in" and which are now "passé," which provide an edge, and which might harm a student's chances.
There is even a psychological malady known as The Yale Syndrome, a sort of obsession with college admission that creates an unusually proximate time horizon for a young person, the moment of college admission. Students who suffer from this affliction do not develop a plan for success in college, or in any aspect of their lives, beyond the arrival of that "fat envelope" detailing their acceptance. Oddly, they share many of the same concepts of time as terminally ill cancer patients.
Parents view admission to one of these schools as a high grade on their parenting skills, and correspondingly view rejection as a low or failing grade. There is a great gnashing of teeth about the whole endeavor. But seldom does anyone really ask the question: Is the Ivy League "worth it"?
How did this national obsession come about? First, let's define what the Ivy League is. In one sense, the Ivy League is a collection of geographically proximate schools that formed a football conference in 1956. If you look at it another way, the Ivy League is a collective brand representing the pinnacle of American higher education. This is the Ivy League: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale. No other school is a member, in spite of what some alumni may mistakenly claim.
The Ivy League has not been a focus of fevered longing for very long. For most of this nation's history, college was a local endeavor. The best and the brightest did not go far to go to college. Then, a convergence of societal trends in the late part of the last century quietly nationalized education, without anyone really noticing. The advent of cheap air travel--and the breakdown of regional differences due to television and the migration of educated workers throughout the country--combined to make bright young people look nationally for college choices. So this collection of venerable schools became a focus of their attentions. The problem is that young people and their families didn't catch on to the level of competition that this change entailed.
As college became a middle-class right instead of an upper-class privilege, a lot more students wanted in to what they perceived to be the most elite schools. One Ivy League school now rejects over 90 percent of the students who apply, and rejects over half of the students who apply with perfect SAT scores. Think about that.
That's where we are today. Everyone in the country wants into the same handful of schools. But what do you get with an Ivy League education, especially as an undergraduate? Is it really the best in the country? These are undeniably good schools, but there are also by my count at least one hundred other schools that do as good or better a job at educating undergraduates. Here's why:
Most Ivy League schools are primarily graduate schools
Large research universities are great places to be a graduate student, and sometimes not-so-great places to be an undergraduate. Alton O. Roberts, a retired professor and an Ivy League grad himself, and formerly principal investigator for a national study of undergraduate instruction when he was with the Center for the Improvement of Instruction at Syracuse University, reports "The undergraduate at these schools is pretty much there to keep the streets paved. The money doesn't go toward the undergraduate budget. A student will face large classes, and teaching assistants instead of professors. The Ivy League degree is a brand, and there is the presumption of intelligence, the presumption of competence, but the undergraduate is not the important person at these schools." One Ivy League school was recently excoriated in a national report because only 40 percent of its classes are taught by tenure-track faculty; the rest are taught by an ad hoc collection of instructors, graduate students, and adjuncts.
Rankings of specific departments often don't favor the Ivy League
Who has the top academic departments in the United States? The most commonly cited ranking system in the United States has been totally debunked, so we won’t be quoting that one here. The National Research Council rankings are considered the gold standard, but they are at this time badly out of date. Although not without its critics, The Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index is generally accepted as a legitimate ranking system by scholars nationwide. The Ivy League shows up with some number-one rankings, but so do Penn State (anthropology), Michigan State (architecture), Indiana U. (French), NYU (mathematics), Washington U. in St. Louis (political science), and so on. The outdated NRC data has similar surprises when objective measures of quality are employed.
Grad schools don't seem to favor Ivy League grads over others
What about admission to graduate school as an indicator of quality? The top per capita producers of Ph.D.s in this country are in fact smaller colleges, most notably, the likes of Reed, Swarthmore, Caltech, Harvey Mudd, and Grinnell, Emory, Bates, Northwestern, and Morehouse, among forty-five others. And the biggest per capita source of women scientists in the United States? Oberlin. Top producer of Black doctors? Not the Ivy League at all, but the pre-Katrina Xavier in New Orleans.
The Ivy League scares some kids to death
Some highly talented students who could get into the Ivy League might do much better to go to the honors college of a public university, according to Marty Nemko, a higher-education consultant and owner of a popular self-named career and education Web site. "You're going to be totally stressed out by the competition. The advantages might be outweighed by the disadvantages. You're not going to get to work with any professors one-on-one, which is where the real intellectual and academic development takes place, and you're not going to get a great letter of recommendation because that faculty member doesn't even know you, or she knows hundreds of other brilliant kids, too."
Nemko also points out that the Ivy League may not pass the value-added test. The Ivy League schools admit the brightest and most achievement-oriented students but, says Nemko, "You could lock these students in a closet for four years and they still would earn more than the kids who didn't get into the top schools, because they're brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections, and that has nothing to do with the Ivy League."
Cutting-edge tech employers may not be as enamored of the Ivy League brand
There certainly are still some places where an Ivy League degree is a known entry ticket, such as Wall Street, but tech firms may not care as much. Bill Watkins, director of engineering for a software consulting firm based in Colorado, has two Ivy League degrees, but that's not what he looks for when he hires engineers. "I'm looking for technical and social skills and, frankly, I don't care if it's the University of Colorado or Cornell. I'm more interested in skills than pedigree." His advice: Go to the school that gives you the best scholarship, where you can graduate with the least debt.
So, do these criticisms mean that the Ivy League doesn't offer good educational opportunities? Not at all. But there are scores of truly awesome schools in this country, many of which do an even better job of educating young undergraduates than the eight members of the Ivy League.
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