<p>@Madaboutx You are making my own case for me. While your answer avoids the issue the arts and artists - you do illustrate my main point which is the society valuing the top 1%, .1%, .01% more than ever. So our bright young Ivy people will gravitate toward this so as to not be labelled a moocher or a loser. The Ayn Rand/Koch/Libertarian slate of values has successfully and somewhat quietly gone mainstream - arguments of persecuted outsider to the contrary.</p>
<p>Ivy league schools may be advantageous for several reasons. The prestige can positively impact one’s personal brand, or reputation (and I do think such a thing exists.) This may have an expiration date as usually people say after the first job, where you went to school doesn’t matter. However, kids applying don’t have their first job yet. The advantages of this augmentation in brand is highly variable and can depend on your goals. However, I don’t think the answer is that it has zero effect. If companies had the same standards for whether one of their commercials influenced the consumers view of them as @pizzagirl has for whether the ivy league brand influences people’s perception of its graduates, companies would never do a commercial–or maybe would just have a 30 sec. spot with the title of the company in bold print. Hey, I don’t think I was more likely to buy a Buick because I saw Tiger Woods riding in one in a commercial, but obviously Buick thinks that influenced somebody.</p>
<p>The education is another factor, though this can vary and there are other places where you can get there. The possible connections are another reason to go.</p>
<p>As for the article, unlike the excerpted quotes the article doesn’t read like it is from a bitter person. However, I don’t really feel the ultimate premise that ivy league people are depressed is correct.</p>
<p>“So our bright young Ivy people will gravitate toward this so as to not be labelled a moocher or a loser. The Ayn Rand/Koch/Libertarian slate of values has successfully and somewhat quietly gone mainstream - arguments of persecuted outsider to the contrary.”</p>
<p>Ayn Rand / Koch / Libertarian slate of values are the most predominant on elite college campuses today? Well, that’s a new one. </p>
<p>"The advantages of this augmentation in brand is highly variable and can depend on your goals. However, I don’t think the answer is that it has zero effect. "</p>
<p>No one has said or even come to close to saying that it has zero effect. But the effects vary from region to region and audience to audience. Meanwhile, the shocking fact is that since the beginning of time, bright, hard-working students at the nation’s top schools want to go to highly compensated jobs. Sure, they may overvalue and idealize them, but that’s part of being young and naive. </p>
<p>And I just can’t get too worked up over how awful it is that bright and hard-working people do well in life, and often better than people who aren’t as bright or hard-working. Isn’t this a BETTER state of affairs than when elite schools admitted by headmaster handshakes, and there was widespread discrimination against certain types of people in the workplace?</p>
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<p>Sure, no question.</p>
<p>I 
a healthy and robust meritocracy over any other system that could be put in place or has existed before.</p>
<p>The notion that elite colleges are responsible for churning out soulless capitalists is just silly. More Ivy students wind up on Wall Street because if you are a business type coming from an Ivy, you CAN wind up on Wall Street. A business type coming from East Directional State U maybe winds up in a middle management position in a marketing firm. Is he less soulless because he isn’t making exorbitant amounts of money?The only difference is that we - or at least Dereicewicz – choose to obsess over the Ivy kids becoming hedge fund managers, and not the state school grads becoming accountants. Now, it is true that being a hedge fund manager may be more time-consuming and stressful than being an accountant, but you know, being President of the US is also probably more stressful than being President of the school board. That doesn’t mean a person who could reasonably become the former should stick with the latter, and in any case, the fact that a certain number of students at Ivies – like students everywhere – will be looking out for the most lucrative and prestigious opportunity doesn’t say anything terrible about the Ivies. It is very easy to pass up a job you were never offered.</p>
<p>And, as Hanna has said, the Ivies et al are far LESS pre-professional than most other schools. .</p>
<p>@patertrium the thing is the vast majority of people want to be in the top 1% of something when they are young, optimistic and idealistic.</p>
<p>Money is a measure of success although I never claimed it was the only measure. It’s just easily quantifiable.</p>
<p>The beautiful thing in America is that you can define success for yourself however you want to and it doesn’t matter how other people see it for themselves. </p>
<p>So worrying about what a 21yo Ivy League student plans to do with his or her life is and thinking that the decision has consequences for you that are somehow greater than the consequences of your own decisions is silly.</p>
<p>@Pizzagirl You seem to be making a straw man “predominant thought on campus” of my words. The Koch network of think tanks has shaped a great deal of opinion in the country in ways that many people don’t even realize. But the most sacrosanct of values includes pushing more power to the top 1 .1 .01%. Topics like thriving artist communities, orchestras, upward mobility of the middle class, health care for the average or lower income person - these are always absent during the fawning of the wealthy. If this is the way the country wants to go - dog eat dog and all that - expect the smart kids to reflect it too. "In 1971, Deresiewicz notes, 73 percent of incoming college freshmen said it was important to develop a meaningful philosophy and only 37 percent deemed it important to be “very well-off.”
By 2011, those figures were reversed: 47 percent for the former and 80 percent for the latter. " So the Koch Libertarians should feel happy, victorious even. </p>
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But those topics aren’t absent at all at the elite universities–which is why Deresiwicz quotes those statistics for all incoming college freshmen that you mention. Maybe the Koch Libertarians have won on a broad national front, but it has nothing to do with D’s points about the Ivy League schools.</p>
<p>“But the most sacrosanct of values includes pushing more power to the top 1 .1 .01%. Topics like thriving artist communities, orchestras, upward mobility of the middle class, health care for the average or lower income person - these are always absent during the fawning of the wealthy.”</p>
<p>That’s right, there’s been virtually no public debate in the last five or so years about the size, role, importance or source of ensuring the average or lower income person has health care. </p>
<p>So patertrium, what <em>should</em> Ivy League / similar elite students do with themselves, if they shouldn’t go into business? Seems a heck of a lot of them do Teach for America, Peace Corps and other “good deeds” that weren’t common in my day.</p>
<p>I think you’re focusing too much on one sub-group. The Ivies / elite schools have all kinds of different students pursuing all kinds of different, interesting paths. Some are engineers working on how to get water safely delivered in Third World countries. Some are artists and dancers and actors. Some are writers. Some are making their mark in government positions. Some are pursuing advertising. And yes, some are on Wall Street. There’s just no real need to elevate those who are as being more important or more a harbinger of anything other than what they are.</p>
<p>Patertrium, how many kids do you have right now in elite schools, with which to observe their experiences?
I have two, and all I can tell you is that, rather than “glorification of the 1%”, if anything, their experiences are more replete with charges of “white privilege” and “SES privilege” because they had the fortune to be born into an upper middle class white family consisting of parents who work darn hard for their money.</p>
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If it’s true, is it a phenomenon among all college students or just among ivy league students? If it’s the latter, do you know in 1971 how many students in these schools were from economically disadvantaged background and middle/upper middle class families vs the wealth by the standards at that time? The composition of the student body at Ivy League has changed drastically over the past few decades, and it’s only natural to see more of the graduates strive to achieve financial success - and as someone upthread pointed out some of them WILL move on to a different career path than what they choose to do fresh out of college. Moreover, we live in a different era. Before you start attributing all this “regression” to ivy league education, look at the society as a whole. All the reason to believe that a fraction of ivy league graduates going to WS would not have such a huge impact to the world. </p>
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LOL well said! A little harsh, but it does fit the situation where people make snarky comments about something they have no experienced with or probably will never.</p>
<p>If the Ivies / elites were made up predominantly of trust-fund-babies with very little diversity, they might NOT have “making money” as a big life goal, because they would already have it. Would that be a good thing, or a bad thing?</p>
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Maybe the college freshmen of today answer surveys more truthfully than those in 1971.</p>
<p>“it is big enough to be a dominating force.”</p>
<p>Says who? Is this your judgment based on the time you have spent on these campuses? People don’t get these jobs until senior year, anyway, so the idea that a choice that 20% of the students will make at the end of their college careers “dominates” the experience on campus is just absurd. 20% of Harvard undergrads are varsity athletes…do they “dominate,” too?</p>
<p>What’s your basis for lumping finance and consulting together? Is it just because they both pay high starting salaries? Are law and med schools a “dominating force” at Ivies? Together, they attract about as many new grads as finance and consulting combined.</p>
<p>I think I prefer a Koch libertarianism - two brothers who start a company that actually makes stuff and it grows to employ over 60,000 people and the guys give away tens of millions of dollars to charities for sick, poor and other unfortunate people - over Clinton liberalism - start a bogus non-profit and trade your power for privilege and tens of millions of dollars by giving speeches and they employing a few friends and families - or Obama corporatism - give corporations everything they want while in power and enacting policies that repress small business and the middle class and printing a trillion dollars per year that goes right into the bank accounts and wallets of Wall Street executives, corporate elites and cronies - or Bush ineptitude - prosecute a war while ignoring the economic home front and hoping a laissez faire attitude will overcome a 2 decades of corrupt policies, excessive govt growth and spending and a pop culture society.</p>
<p>Does going into non-profit work only count if the organization is not prestigious? Sheesh. I think the world-savers I know who work at the ACLU and the Department of Justice and Doctors Without Borders still get credit for their work.</p>
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<p>This can vary greatly depending on campus. </p>
<p>At Columbia U, the undergrad/grad students seems to be an even split between the loud vocal progressive left activist groups, just as loud vocal right-leaning libertarians who eagerly look forward to becoming part of/maintaining their position as part of that 1%, and the vast majority who find both obnoxious…but tend to lean more towards the libertarians on the pre-professional aspect. </p>
<p>At NYU, the split can be viewed between Stern School of Business and other undergrad colleges…especially Tisch, CAS, and Steinhardt even though several friends who attended/taught at both for undergrad/grad school/as faculty have found NYU undergrads seem more progressively left overall despite Stern’s visible greater conservative pre-professional attitudes. </p>