Going to An Ivy League School Sucks-- Article

One of the things adcoms do look for, after the academic talents and ability to engage, included in the right “personal attributes,” is this stress tolerance and resilience. Not perfect.

Wait a sec. I just read the links from @PatentPending. I suspect this kid thinks he’s an artiste, meaning to question and rile up folks. I just find it hard to be amused. He may be brilliant or just another dart thrower, who knows? Some artistes are quite smart and clever, their clock just ticks differently. And some are empty. Time will tell.

@lookingforward: Exactly!

Candidates for the Presidency of this country can speak about smoking drugs and still be credible but a junior in college automatically loses credibility.

Why does everyone want to shoot the messenger in this country?

I certainly understand that the Ivies were a totally different environment in the past, but did students (whatever their motivation to attend these schools) feel the pressure like they do today to succeed and be successful? Maybe todays pressure is so unlike the past, that the question should be: Is it something we should/could stop or reduce? Is it human nature to continue the path of more and more competition especially with a global society?

Pressure is another relative term. It’s also a reality of most successful lives. The trick is to know how to balance (and that’s not necessarily thumbing your nose at a college, employer, or your peers.)

But your question: my mother’s experience at an Ivy seems to have mirrored mine at an LAC- and my daughters’ experiences at another LAC. Academically, socially, and in the sense of growth, self reliance, even a little testing of limits. My father hated H, didn’t make friendships that stuck. Otoh, his brother was happy enough that he’s still there.

D1’s first post-grad salaried job was brutal. I told her she would never regret the experience, the prep. But she was ready for it, based on other challenge experiences. I think I could guess a large number of parents who would agree kids have to be prepared to manage the hard parts.

As someone who had a bad experience at another Ivy, I can relate a lot to what the author is saying, within reason.

The problem with speaking out against the Ivies is that you always get the same predictable types of pushback (some of which can be quite visceral):

  1. People who claim you are unfairly generalizing the whole.
  2. People who claim that you must not be "Ivy material" if you're complaining -- that somehow you're just not up to snuff.
  3. People who claim that your problems are more your own and not the school's.
  4. People who feel zero sympathy for someone's hardships simply because he/she attends an elite institution.
  5. People who can't relate to what you're saying because they can't empathize with your circumstances (usually because they're part of the very group you're criticizing).

The #1’s I find less interesting because I think it should go without saying that these kinds of anecdotes are not meant to be universal, but rather applicable to a nontrivial segment not worth ignoring. Look at it in terms of a bell curve if you want.

The #2’s I think can be unnecessarily cruel, but it doesn’t make them wrong. I think it depends a lot on the situation, and it’s hard to tell from a cursory glance.

The #3’s may or may not be right, but I’d like to elaborate on why they can often be wrong. Yes, some students enter college with baggage that makes it hard for them to fully enjoy the college experience, but I think certain elite institutions do a really poor job at providing resources for these kids. Most of it feels like it’s there out of formality just so the schools can say they provide such-and-such. It doesn’t necessarily imply that these services are even remotely close to being effective or useful.

The #4’s I think are misguided. There are always going to be people out there who have it better/worse than us. It doesn’t make their feelings or struggles any less valid. Different circumstances result in different tradeoffs.

The #5’s are a big one. For example, if you happen to be from a very rich family, you may not be able to understand what it’s like to not have that money when going through the same situation. I find that as you start to get into details, people get frustrated and simply don’t want to hear it anymore (I suspect because the cognitive dissonance makes them uncomfortable).

Anyways, all that being said, I wanted to address the article a bit.

  1. The people:

Not everyone who attends has rich-donor parents, but I think pointing this out is too easy. While, certainly, there are tons of kids with rich parents, I think it is more accurate to say that many of the students come from relatively privileged backgrounds, and even among those who aren’t, they tend to have intelligent / educated parents in some way (or at least a strong support system). If you come from an abusive or unsupportive household, you’re on your own. Few peers will be able to relate to you, and the administration will not know how to help you. Even the on-campus therapists are woefully ignorant when it comes to certain dynamics, but this is another whopper of a subject in itself.

  1. The culture of fakeness:

I think there is some merit to this, but at the same time, I think it’s more indicative of the current economic climate. College is really expensive nowadays, so it makes sense to pursue something that will give you a decent rate of return. If you don’t like that many people are graduating with econ degrees, then blame the job market for paying econ graduates so well. But that’s the way things are, so that’s how they’ll continue until the tides shift.

  1. Classmates are your competition:

To some degree. I think the bigger influence is connections / cheating.

Some professors were lazy and reused old material, which meant if you had an older sibling who took the class before, you could get access to old notes, answers, material, etc. If you’re from a poor family, odds are you don’t have any siblings who can help out (and so you have to be lucky enough to be among friends who do). I was surprised at how often I encountered this sort of thing.

Or maybe you’re taking a difficult accounting class and, surprise, one of your classmates has two senior accountants for parents who will help ensure that that kid’s group aces the assignment. Again, if you’re poor, odds are nobody in your family can help out like this.

So I think the main difficulty is that the playing field is not the same for everyone, which makes the competition barriers very asymmetrical.

But, at the same time, it’s that way in real life, too. However, that’s not very satisfying to hear when you’re a poor student who is trying to gain some upward mobility and yet is still experiencing the same problems at the most elite institutions.

  1. The pressure is intense:

I’m tired of typing at this point so I’m just going to say “yeah, it’s intense.”

@menefrega

A person’s actions puts their comments in context. In this case:

  • The need for a “deprave cocktail” of drugs and 2 all nighters a week, could indicate that they are not really able to handle the workload at college without even more depraved drug cocktails.
  • I would be surprised if his doctor was prescribing the drugs for the purpose of doing 2 all nighters a week, but to be generous, I will assume he had a doctor who did that.
  • The correlation between pot usage and paranoia is well established, so it is unclear how many of the observations are valid vs. driven by paranoia.
  • I don’t know if he has a license for the pot based on the NY law “having one of the following severe debilitating or life-threatening conditions: cancer, etc,” but it is odd that he didn’t mention any of those conditions because that would put more light on his situation. Not sure why he would be lighting up with friends to talk about God - that doesn’t sound like one of the life-threatening conditions.
  • Politicians drug use is far enough in the past, that their record since then should be what they are judged on. I expect that if the President was still a participating member of the “choom gang”, that it would have been a bigger issue.

What message is this article about anyway? College is hard. There is competition, people you don’t like, shallow people, driven people, etc. etc. Just like life. Maybe you shouldn’t go to a college if you need to do depraved cocktails, 2 all nighters and other drugs to get into it. Maybe that isn’t a fit.

Playing field is not the same, but the real intelligence - the sum of common sense, IQ, and EQ, and more generally people skills - that is what matters. A poor person who has that can get along great. A rich person who hasn’t had to learn or use such skills might be at a disadvantage.

My spouse’s parents are not educated, and very discriminatory towards those not in their group (even discriminatory towards college at all). He is the exact opposite of them (otherwise I would have not even gone out with him in the first place, let alone spent 30 years with him).

I think at some point people figure out where to fit in literally anywhere, or they have to move on to somewhere where they are comfortable. The point made about the prevalence of depression in college is key. You either laugh at your crazy classmates or you are intimidated by them. You either study more or you fail.

I would be interested in knowing what this particular students background was, that he wasn’t getting proper guidance (to go to an Ivy or not) or support (to have such an extremely negative experience).

Read the entire article.

While a few things were some echoed by HS classmates who attended Columbia(isolation on a large bureaucratic campus, some snobbery, etc), it wasn’t to the degree experienced by the author of the article.

One major clue is the fact he felt the need to take all those drugs and pulling all-nighters to get into an elite school like Columbia. IMO, if one needs to take drugs to be a contender to getting admitted there, he’s already in trouble and well-behind the 8-ball on campus.

Sounded like he was already pushing himself near his absolute limits and couldn’t take much more pressure than what was in HS and Columbia was a bit too much for him. However, that’s not necessarily the case for every Columbia student…or anyone else.

Another thing is if he felt 2-all-nighters per week is stressful in HS, he would not have survived attending my public magnet HS where the level of competition and backbiting from the jerky portion of the top 25% was far worse than what my friends and I observed at Columbia or other Ivies/elite colleges. Nearly everyone I knew who took APs or DE college classes at schools like NYU and Columbia were routinely staying up till 3-4 am every night with more average all-nighters than 2 nights/week for some. Got to see some of this when visiting some homes for group study sessions. However, as the slacker…I usually ended up sleeping around 1-2 am and never pulled an all-nighter in HS.

There was a reason why one popular saying in my HS was sleep, friends, academics, pick 2. Most chose to forgo sleep.

I don’t necessarily know about that as I knew many HS classmates and colleagues who never took APs who were admitted, excelled at various Ivies/elites including Columbia, and found they had much more free time to sleep, hang out, party, work extra jobs even while taking 5-6+ classes/semester because they loved the class offerings. They also found the academic pacing to be more reasonable for themselves than HS.

Incidentally, my father had serious concerns about my surprise acceptance to my LAC with a near-full ride FA/scholarship package considering my abysmal HS GPA as he wondered whether I was over my head for similar reasons. Thinking about it still prompts much chuckling over his overblown worries considering my transcript and how much more time I had for sleep, ECs, part-time jobs, and hanging out I had compared to HS.

Incidentally, I took some graduate classes at Columbia and if I had a choice between HS or grad…grad was more manageable.

The problem with speaking out and calling out stereotyping for what it is that you get the above 5 responses, which are not much more accurate than the screed of an article we’ve been treated to. Here are 6 more “types” of people found on this thread and in real life:

6. People who are able to recognize hyperbole bordering on libel.

7. People who see in someone's writing a lack of critical thinking skills and/or an emotional state which severely misrepresents the proportion of mixed-up students we're supposed to trust by his (or anyone's) anecdotes do exist there.

8. People who know their law: The problems are not "the school's." The school possesses no liability for what the author of the article b** encountered. "The school" (Columbia) did not create the products who matriculated to Columbia, nor is Columbia or any other Ivy engaged in psychiatry as an element of admissions.

9. People who feel lots of sympathy and even empathy for students who are seriously depressed, apparently not treated, apparently not willing to take responsibility for the effect of that depression on their perceptions about their environments, which by definition for a depressed person are **negative, and often extremely so.**

10. People who can relate to the reality that there is at least a small core group at every Elite institution who are not pleasant company for a variety of reasons, attitudinal and otherwise, but who do not respect the mischaracterizing of an entire institution by such unpleasantness.

11. People who recognize depression for its clinical manifestations and aren't confused about whether that's the depressed person's issue or "the school's" issue.

I feel pretty confident in saying: No, the students of 40-50 years ago did not feel the same pressures of today. They probably felt a different kind of pressure - that only certain careers were socially acceptable - the “ivy” women at Radcliffe and Pembroke were certainly under pressure to come away with an MRS degree (I guess if you talk to Susan Patton though the pressure is certainly still alive and well for some http://dailyprincetonian.com/opinion/2013/03/letter-to-the-editor-advice-for-the-young-women-of-princeton-the-daughters-i-never-had/). But I think a key component, and someone was right to mention it above, is that the economy is also very different from 40-50 years ago. 40-50 years ago you didn’t have people going into debt to attend ivy league schools (not only was tuition lower but the schools were need aware in admissions and financial aid for low income students was simply less common/accessible) and the people who went to the ivies - no matter what they studied - didn’t have serious concerns about ending up in low paying careers. They were “Ivy League Graduates” at a time where it really did make a big difference to be one. Lower paying careers are where the high school graduates went and they were satisfactorily employed especially since unlike today’s students they didn’t have any debt and by 22 had 4 years of full pay salary with benefits and investments under their belts.

These are the tougher questions. I think it could be reduced but I don’t know whether “we” want to or should.

The “Ivy experience” in the past was nowhere near as different as iwannabe_Brown asserts. There was lots of pressure to live up to the expectations, lots of pressure from suddenly encountering many really brilliant students, lots of internal pressure and depression. It was much easier to be accepted (if you were coming from one of the traditional sources of applications), but it was still harder to get accepted there than anywhere else. For students coming from non-traditional sources – inner city neighborhoods, rural communities outside the Northeast – there was plenty of alienation and culture shock. There was plenty of gap between wealthy and nonwealthy students.

At Yale, at least, at the time, wealth differences were mitigated by the fact that it was completely uncool to flaunt wealth. Kids who had millions in their trust funds did not live very differently, day-to-day, than scholarship kids, at least while they were at school, and no one spent a ton of money on entertainment. (There were many, many opportunities to drink for free on the university.) The pay from a couple hours of part-time work was plenty enough to hold up your end of group social life. Skull & Bones (and similar, high-prestige clubs) had plenty of talented low- or middle-class kids alongside wealthy legacies like the Bushes.

Other colleges were not quite so egalitarian. It has always been an issue with Columbia and NYU that New York City offers practically unlimited opportunities to spend money on really great stuff, so that it’s impossible to ignore differences in disposable cash. Everyone I know who went to Columbia and wasn’t really rich felt poor there, and suffered for it more than they would have lots of comparable places.

Probably the two biggest, most important differences: (1) The cost. In the mid-70s, the COA was around $4-5,000/year. A $1,000 National Merit Scholarship made a big difference. Part-time and summer jobs could make a big difference. It was an inflationary environment, and costs were going up, but they still lagged inflation, so when we looked to the future it did not seem scary to repay any loans that had to be carried. When my wife graduated in 1979, she ultimately got an entry-level job at a small, struggling nonprofit. The starting annual salary at that job was about what the total cost for her college degree had been. (She didn’t have college loans to repay, but she was able to save enough for a year of Ivy League law school in 18 months of working a public interest job.) (2) The range of outcomes. Of course it made a difference whether you went into investment banking, vs. public service, vs. being a struggling artist. But most of that difference was long-term, in future expected earnings. Starting salaries were way more compressed. The starting salary I was offered on Wall St. was only about 25% more than my wife’s public interest salary. (Today the difference could be 300% or more.) So there was much less hydraulic pressure to snag a job in finance or consulting. People weren’t afraid to follow their dreams, at least for a bit.

“Not everyone who attends has rich-donor parents, but I think pointing this out is too easy. While, certainly, there are tons of kids with rich parents, I think it is more accurate to say that many of the students come from relatively privileged backgrounds, and even among those who aren’t, they tend to have intelligent / educated parents in some way (or at least a strong support system). If you come from an abusive or unsupportive household, you’re on your own.”

I feel compelled to point out economically privileged backgrounds can be abusive and/or unsupportive. It is somewhat annoying when it’s assumed that someone who comes from whatever amount of money (whether it’s “standard” upper middle class professional parents full pay, or whether it’s more-money-than-god) has therefore had no or only minor hurdles in life.

40 years ago, when I was a freshman in college, there was NO pressure for Ivy League women to get a MRS when they graduated. None whatsoever. For my college friends, the marriage floodgates opened 5-6 years after graduation. Most people married people they met in graduate school or in professional employment. Women were very wary of marrying before they got some career momentum, and (at the time, at least) they expected to continue paid employment after marriage.

I am not certain the same would have been true 50 years ago.

Pizzagirl: What you say is certainly true.

Whether or not you are critical of the author, he brings up very real issues that have existed in high pressure/prestigious institutions for decades. My wife and I both attended an Ivy so well known for suicide they had fencing and nets installed on the campus bridges. There were many students there who’s primary reason for attending was “the name” or parental pressure rather than their own interests. It was easy to “lose your way” and felt like there was an inadequate support system. Even “friends” secretly hoped you did poorly on tests to “lower the curve”. Neither my wife nor I got to know any of our professors. We thought that was just the way it was, that there was no other option. We just “grinded it out” like an earlier post suggested. While we more recently visited many Ivys with our 3 children, little about them appears to have changed. Admissions officers quoted SAT scores and Grad School acceptance rates rather over individual success stories and “fit”.

Contrast that experience to that of our children, all of whom chose top LACs over Ivys and have thrived. An earlier poster noted that his/her son was also a Columbia junior but “hadn’t ever heard” of the author - this is typical of the isolation a large competitive institution can engender. This would be much less likely at a LAC. Even the top LACs (with students of the same caliber as many Ivys) feel much less “competitive” and more supportive. This is embodied by the professors, who teach even freshman-level courses (No TAs), and are rewarded more for excellence in teaching than research/publishing. My wife and I have had dinner with more of our kid’s professors than our own.

If you thrive on being cutthroat and your self-worth is strongly tied to society’s definition of prestige, then the Ivys are the right “fit”. Most others would likely be better off attending a LAC.

This is an email I just got from my cousin. I thought it was relevant to the conversation. Also, in our case, son will attend Penn after a gap year, and Penn is so affordable thanks to tremendous need-based aid and a very generous Coporate National Merit yearly scholarship, my son will not feel the pressure of needing to even do work study as he would have at any of the Cal State or UC schools. In that regard, it will be much easier for him to just focus on school without worrying about finances-a huge plus.

Also, I have no idea how my son will fare at Penn. He had never heard the term Ivy League until this year as a senior. He applied to Penn because it had the majors he wanted and the financial aid he needed. We were astonished that he got in. It was never, ever about prestige for him. That has zero value in his life. He was just as happy to consider Cal State Fullerton, and if he’d gotten the full tuition scholarship, he may well have chosen that over Penn. Don’t assume everyone who gets into, and attends, an Ivy, is there for the same reason.

Anyhow, here’s the email I got today:

I spent this past weekend in Philadelphia at my Penn reunion, and would love to meet you there in September. The campus and the city both looked great, and I was both excited and envious when I imagined (your son) being there. It’s all so much better than it was in my day! We gave ourselves an unofficial tour of the newer buildings and took a walk through some of the off-campus areas where students and faculty tend to live. A couple of my college friends have kids who also went to Penn, and we were marveling at how much more the school now does for its students, especially when it comes to advisement and support. And the city itself has gone from being a stuffy little burg with a nice art museum, a couple of old-timey department stores, and some quaint but shabby old buildings, to being a great place for the arts, a center of historic architectural preservation, and a destination for fine dining and contemporary shopping.

My kids and nephews attended Cornell, the Ivy Sarahsdad referenced in post 116. All of them have and are thriving at the school. As far as support system, when D1 was very sick one semester, all of her professors gave her extensions without giving her a hard time. They have made themselves available whenever my kids needed help. As far as having dinner with professors, not every kid thinks it’s a perk. When D1 visited a small LAC, the tour guide told us if a student should not go to class for few days, the dean would call to make sure everything was fine. D1 said, “You mean, like a babysitter?”

I went to Colgate for UG. I got a great education and enjoyed my experience there. I took both of my kids to Colgate for college tour. They loved the campus and many things it had to offer, but after 13 years of nurturing private school environment, they wanted a large U atmosphere. Contrary to sarahsdad’s experience, they met many supportive friends at Cornell. Whenever I went to the school for their dance recitals I would find their friends (boys and girls) in the audience. Sometimes during rush, their guy friends would bring the whole pledge class to the recital (maybe it was part of hazing to have to watch a dance recital).

Just for the record, I know my kids have partied late into the night, but I have rarely heard of them staying up all night for school work. D1 did say her best friend used to pull all nighters all the time, but it was because the friend would surf the net, look at social media until late at night before getting down to work.

Uhmmm…I get the feeling that while some of the sentiments may have some truth (in terms of those places actually feeling that way), that there is some hyperbole being used to describe events.