Going to An Ivy League School Sucks-- Article

Well, maybe malcontent isn’t the right word. Hypocrite? Whiner? Phony? Poser? Provocateur? Would one of those fit better? As we’ve often noted when discussing the former Yale professor whose name I can’t spell, writing a lengthy screed with 10% valid points and 90% baloney just isn’t that persuasive.

I love elite schools. I also think they and the culture around them can be open to critique. For me, that’s not contradictory.

And it appears Zach has not transferred.

And of course everyone can and does make choices. Doesn’t mean there aren’t pressures. And doesn’t mean that going “off the grid,” so to speak, on a 6 to 12 month exploration doesn’t foreclose some options later, unless of course one can (self consciously?) turn that detour into an exceptional EC.

Unless of course one thinks the article, written by a 20 year old college kid, might be 60-70% valid. Or, he could have simply steered a narrative between the correct (appreciative) goalposts with sappy blathering about how wonderful it is be an Ivy kid.

Of course not. He’s just biting the hand that feeds him.

“And doesn’t mean that going “off the grid,” so to speak, on a 6 to 12 month exploration doesn’t foreclose some options later, unless of course one can (self consciously?) turn that detour into an exceptional EC.”

Yes. Such is life. All aspects of life, not just college admissions and first-job status. Every door walked through is another door not walked through, or whatever aphorism you wish. There’s just no way around it.

Look, you’re talking about OUR KIDS. Of course we know what kind of pressure they are under.

Ironically, my own kid took the approach that you seem to be endorsing to education. Encouraged by me. Look around. Explore intellectually. Figure out what you love. Except, of course, after you look around you have to take the MCATs, right? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

There’s nothing wrong with mentioning one’s children’s experiences when they are relevant to a thread.

not “thoughtful”
And when one behaves like a two year old, yes, it’s entirely within bounds to be called out for 2-year-old behavior. Some of us can still recognize 2-year-old behavior when we see it.

I think it all comes down to fit. I like to think I’m a bright kid; I get good grades, am involved in outreach work, and get good test scores. When I was transferring, I got into my dream school-Northeastern. It’s a respectable school and I was psyched, until I realized a friend of mine was going to an ivy. The school I was so excited about started to embarrass me because I thought that if I was really, actually intelligent, I’d be going to UPenn or another Ivy.

In reality, an Ivy probably wouldn’t be the best fit-the reason I love Northeastern is the hands-on nature of the school. It sounds like Columbia isn’t the best fit for this student, and that doesn’t mean he’s not smart enough for it-only that another school probably has what he’s looking for.

@Consolation, I agree with your first sentence. We are (I assume) talking about OUR KIDS for the most part.

I like how people say that we shouldn’t make generalizations about Ivy’s and then in the same post make a generalization based on their experience attending an Ivy or having their kid attend one.

Your perceptiveness–it frightens me.

I want to say, first off, that I agree with you here.

But I’d like to get into one of the problems with this.

One of the articles that the author linked to illustrates this quite well (and is something I can personally relate to):

http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2015/04/09/what-like-poor-ivy-league-school/xPtql5uzDb6r9AUFER8R0O/story.html

Namely, examples like this:

This sort of thing is huge. If you lack money, your options become very limited and sooner or later, people notice – either because of how much you work, what you wear, how you spend your money, how you spend your free time, what attitudes you have, what social nuances you possess, where you go during school breaks, etc.

Such discrimination also exists at the bureaucratic level. I was assaulted by a fellow student who was drunk, whose father was a wealthy donor. The school did absolutely nothing to help me, and everything to suppress the incident and move on. The other student received no punishment.

I’ve seen students magically get their grades raised (even higher than mine) despite having consistently lower performance across the semester. And yet if I tried the same thing, I was always told “There’s nothing we can do.” Even to this day I have no idea how they pulled that off.

So I take issue with this notion that these schools don’t somehow have problems, or that there isn’t drastically unequal treatment when it comes to privilege. Most kids at elite institutions aren’t from disadvantaged backgrounds, so it should not be a surprise that we’re going to run into lots of responses along the lines of “Well, I didn’t have that experience.”

It is true that like attracts like. Now that I’ve graduated and worked hard to establish financial security for myself, and better understand the dynamics involved, I no longer attract the same people I did in college. But when you’re 18 years old and coming right out of a disadvantaged and/or broken home, you aren’t going to change overnight. Your background is still very much a part of you. While this is still “the student’s” problem, there is nothing in place to help people who don’t fit into the typical mold.

After all, it’s how a lot of us got into these schools in the first place. A lot of us didn’t have guidance counselors who could advise us, or parents to help us with homework, or college reps coming to our underfunded public high schools to tell us why their university was worth checking out. We did our own research, learned the process, jumped through all the hoops, studied for the SATs alone, nailed the scores, nailed the grades, nailed the essays, and got in.

But that attitude still carries over into college. You’re still used to doing everything yourself. If you’re coming into the school and are unfamiliar with certain frameworks, you’re going to be left out of the loop – and there’s nobody there to teach you what you need to know.

This is also consistent with this piece from the article above:

And I might add something that makes this situation even worse, at least based on my experience: If you reach out for help, you’ll often get cast aside. In this sense I feel the system is very much rigged in favor of the privileged. Whether or not people think any of this is a problem is a separate question.

@finalchild My apologies. I did not grasp your intent on first reading.

None of that happened to my daughter. And by the way, as to the “what you wear,” monied people who have true class often dress down and avoid ostentatious signs of wealth, period. Id say that, based on her own reports, my own non-monied daughter mingled mainly with middle class and upper middle class – for example, students from families whose siblings were attending both private and public high schools. Based on our whole family’s experience, consciousness of wealth (and siphoning friendships based strictly or mainly on that) is more prevalent in high school than on today’s college campuses. I’m sure some people are so shallow as to insist on associating only with others of their identical economic class, but my daughter would never care about such people or seek them out; it’s very unlikely that such people would have become trusted friends of hers, ever, or would in the future.

Again, as I said earlier, three of the students I recently advised are currently enrolled in Columbia (freshman through junior years), and absolutely none of them has a remotely similar perspective as the author does. One of them had a difficult roommate first semester but was able to maneuver a dorm change. I had a difficult roommate my first semester of college as well; it was a public college. The author is just discovering that life is sometimes challenging or disappointing, and it’s our job to overcome those challenges? That that’s part of the journey toward maturity? Are all disappointments traumas now? Requiring public sympathy?

"Friends paired off quickly. “You’d get weeded out of friendships based on what you could afford. If someone said let’s go to the Square for dinner and see a movie, you’d move on,” she says. "

That happens at all levels, though. I get how the poor kid who can’t afford to go out for pizza and a movie feels he can’t hang with the middle or even upper middle class kid who can afford to do so – but by the same token, the upper middle class kid who CAN afford the pizza, movie and a Starbucks latte and a muffin while he’s at it may not necessarily be able to hang with the truly wealthy kid whose tastes run to fine dining and expensive theater tickets. The world does not divide into “poor” and “have everything one wants at all times.”

I can’t speak for all of the Ivies or other elite schools, but Yale appears to be a school (from what I understand) that tries to do a particularly fine job in trying to level the playing field … similar prices paid for dorms (so no “rich dorms and poor dorms”), residential colleges offering plenty of free / low-cost social activities, etc. I daresay that elite schools with lots of money have the ability to do this BETTER than state schools.

And I think some of you completely kid yourself that one can only find wealthy kids with expensive spending habits at Ivy / elite schools. There are rich kids at EVERY state flagship.

To some extent this is also a function of geographic area. One can find a lot of things to spend money on in NYC, not so much in Hanover, NH (or Grinnell, Iowa for that matter).

But how are you ever going to solve this? Some people are always going to have more money than others. You can’t spend your life fretting about not being Bill Gates.

That is a strawman. No one is saying these schools don’t have problems. The schools are run by humans and humans are not perfect.

Anyone who goes to an Ivy is privileged compared to the vast overwhelming majority of 18 year olds.

It’s not a strawman. That comment was meant to be a response to such comments as in this post:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/18500460/#Comment_18500460

Just because something isn’t relevant to you doesn’t mean it isn’t relevant to somebody else.

I had forgotten how addictive posting can be. One smoke (post) and within 5 minutes it’s back to a pack a day, and right back on the same corner with the same folks.

I liked the article. I bet I would like the kid. If we had a conversation I’m sure I’d challenge him about the “extremes” in his article. But if that stuff is considered extreme, what can we imagine kids are free to discuss in class? I typically become angered when I hear some attack elite schools as only serving to further inculcate and promote a Northeast liberal bias…that kids at such schools are expected to express certain views and will be docked or called out if they don’t. The kid didn’t write anything THAT radical. He hit on some things that likely resonate more than is being noted here, but, regardless, shouldn’t simply disagreeing with him be sufficient?

Now, back to rehab…

I expect the points are exaggerated to increase viewership, but there is an element of truth to the claims. I’ll go point by point from the article:

The Columbia girl who committed suicide attempted suicide in the year prior to arriving at Columbia while at high school, and committed suicide on the first day she arrived on campus. The stress of leaving home may have contributed to suicide, but considering that she had been on campus for less than a day, it sounds like the suicide related to the person who was admitted rather than the stress of academics/competiveness/, at Columbia. I wouldn’t say depression is “the norm”, but a large portion of students at ivies do report being depressed in surveys. However, there is a high depression rate in non-ivies as well. For example, in the survey of 153 colleges at http://www.acha-ncha.org/docs/ACHA-NCHA-II_ReferenceGroup_ExecutiveSummary_Spring2013.pdf , 31% of college students reported feeling “so depressed that it was difficult to function” at some point in the past 12 months. 7% reported seriously considering suicide. While the rate of depression and other mental health issues is concerning, I’d expect numbers are similar for ivies as less selective, non-ivies.

There are indeed special groups that have relaxed academic admission standards, including children of those who make large donations. However, these large donator/celebrity types only make a small portion of the overall entering class. Note that “relaxed” doesn’t mean guaranteed admission. In most cases, the students are capable of doing the work, as can be seen by the extremely high graduation rate. They just are less academically qualified than certain other rejected applicants Other larger groups with relaxed admission standards include certain athletes and certain URMs. How much these groups should be favored in admission is debatable, but this effect is certainly not limited to ivies.

I believe the larger portion of economics majors and Wall Street type jobs is more prominent at ivies than the vast majority of other colleges, largely due to the closer distance to Wall Street and the “elite finance” type recruiting methods. A notable portion of students at other highly selective colleges also favor higher paying, more pragmatic fields, over passions in less pragmatic areas, but often with less of a finance/consulting focus. For example, at Stanford economics is not within the 5 most common majors. Instead the top 2 majors are CS and human biology. CS students often get 6 figure starting salaries in the nearby Silicon Valley, and human biology majors often are planning to attend med school. It was my experience at Stanford that while some were not passionate about the field, they were a minority. Most did seem passionate about their CS major or med school plans. The human biology students I knew who appeared to have little passion for medicine usually ended up working in other fields that they were more passionate about after graduation.

It was my experience at Stanford that this was not accurate. Most students studied in groups, did problem sets in groups (when allowed, as it usually was in engineering), and genuinely tried to help their classmates succeed, even if it meant sacrifices on their part to assist others. There were certainly a small portion of students who were cut throat competitor types, but they appeared to be a small minority. I’d also expect similar statements could be made about ivies, but since I have not attended I will go by what others have said in the thread.

At Stanford, this is called the “Stanford duck syndrome”. The name relates to seeming fine and unstressed on the surface while rapidly paddling below the water. While a good portion of students do feel stressed and have other mental health issues, I’ve never heard about the extremes mentioned in the articles. I’ve never seen students appearing to compete with each other for more classes, internships, or clubs. The people I knew who stayed up all night were more likely to be partying all night than studying or doing assignments. Some students did spend what I considered to be an unreasonably large amount of time studying or partying, but most appeared to have a balanced life without extremes and with activities outside of classes as well. For example, if a dormmate asked if anyone wanted to hiking / rock climbing / or other random activity that weekend, there’d usually be several who would accept the offer. Again I’d also expect similar statements could be made about ivies, but since I have not attended I will go by what others have said in the thread.