The Ivy League. Still The Best Education In the World?

Tens of thousands of alumni swear by it: the Ivy League education is the best way to go if you want to get ahead. The eight private universities comprising this exclusive group – Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, and University of Pennsylvania – consistently rank in the top fifteen listings in U.S. News and World Report, widely considered the premier authority on quality U.S. colleges. (To a lesser degree, the women’s colleges Barnard, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, and Radcliffe can also be classified with these eight colleges.)

And it’s more than that. These colleges are among the oldest in the country, and partly due to this have the highest endowments of U.S. colleges. Harvard, for instance, has a $25 billion endowment, and Yale a $15 billion, making them the two wealthiest universities in the world. Because they can pay for them, they attract top-tier faculty and students. And businesses tend to seek out young men and women who have graduated from their hallowed halls when looking for entry-level employees.

The Ivy League institutions are able to attract students from a wide base; poor students are afforded financial assistance, international students encouraged to attend. Each school prides itself on its ethnic, national, racial, and social diversity. At most, a quarter of applicants to these schools are accepted today, making it easy for admissions groups to balance their population.

And then, when you get out of college, you’ll need to find a great job. Ivy League colleges are renowned for their old-boys system, where alumni in high-powered positions (a common thing) seek new graduates from Ivy League universities to fill positions in their companies, or help new graduates find good jobs with competitors. If you graduate from an Ivy League university, you’re almost guaranteed a rosy future career-wise.

All of this taken together makes the Ivy League education seem seductively good. But all is not perfect in the world of the Ivy League.

Ivy League Limits

What if you want to get a cracking good technical degree? Something in computers, something engineery? Forget about the Ivy League. These colleges are much better preparation for liberal arts based careers or medical careers. Lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats are from here, as are journalists, artists, and executives.

If you want the best possible technical degree, you should consider something like MIT. Located right next door to Harvard, MIT for decades has provided the very best technological education in the world, with many of the same benefits as the Ivy League schools.

What if you want to be a brilliant fiction writer? University of Iowa. A great journalist? Northwestern, in Chicago, is a better choice.

What if you want to be the best doctor in the world? Harvard is listed as the best, but for certain specialties Johns Hopkins is far and away the actual best.

What if you live in Los Angeles and don’t want to move too far from home? Forget the Ivy League; every single one is up in the Northeast. Berkeley may be more your style.

The point is, while the Ivy League education is still excellent, it has its limits. It is not, in any way, the only way to go with education.

But there’s a more disturbing trend worming its way through the Ivy Leagues. All American schools of higher education are starting to suffer from it. But the cancer started at the Ivys, and continues to run raggedly through them. It affects quality of life for students, quality of faculty, quality of education, even quality of thought.

It’s political correctness. This is where the Ivys show the greatest weakness.

The P.C. University

Political correctness started out as a wonderful idea. Why not, said Noam Chomsky and other intellectuals, change the tone of the debate by changing the words used? Chomsky and others believed that the words we use shape the way we think and perceive the world. If we could remove negative words and reinforce positive ones, wouldn’t that make it easier for all of us to get along?

This idea was implemented in the universities where these intellectuals worked. And since they were the premier intellectuals of America, most of their workplaces were the premier universities – the Ivys. Things started to change. Students were selected on basis of diversity more. (With a huge applicant base, the Ivys could afford to do this while sacrificing very little in the way of candidate quality.)Certain types of speech were as much as outlawed, or at least shunned. Other types of speech were encouraged. And slowly, the way the students and lesser professors thought began to change.

Had this remained at the idealized level of the Ivys, it might not have been bad. But it trickled down to the other universities. Diversity was seen as a goal, not an ideal, leading to quotas admission policies. The policing of sexually-harassing speech became the eliminating of much flirting. Fringe minorities became bold, and then obnoxious.

And then the invention of the intellectuals rebounded. The Ivys started to use the same tools as the lesser universities – but since the ideas began there, they grew more institutionalized. And a terrible thing happened. While the universities grew in diversity of race and culture and nationality and ethnicity and socioeconomic levels, they actually decreased in diversity of thought.

The students, trying to give the universities what they so obviously wanted, became different on the outside, but often identical on the inside. The universities, in essence, lost the very diversity they had sought by trying to eliminate conflict. They did not see that conflict is the very basis of intellectual thought.

Want proof? Read about Harvard’s last president, Lawrence Summers, and what happened when he dared express an idea that ran counter to canon. He did not try to force this idea on others. He cited good scientific research. But today this talented man no longer works for Harvard students. Watch for more of the same in the future.

Solutions: Other Quality Colleges and Universities

The Ivys will, without a doubt, recover. They are too old and venerable not to weather this storm. But while they are struggling with an internal quality problem that few of their leaders even see today.

There are a group of public universities that are reputed to provide the Ivy League experience at a public school price, including the following:

• College of William and Mary
• Miami University (Ohio)
• University of California system
• University of Michigan
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• University of Texas at Austin
• University of Vermont
• University of Virginia
• Binghamton University
• Indiana University Bloomington
• Michigan State University
• Ohio State University
• Pennsylvania State University
• Rutgers University
• University of Arizona
• University of Colorado at Boulder
• University of Connecticut
• University of Delaware
• University of Florida
• University of Georgia
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• University of Iowa
• University of Maryland, College Park
• University of Minnesota , Twin Cities
• University of Washington
• University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Georgia Tech

Hardly any of these schools are in the North; most are located in the South or the Midwest. The point is, you can get just as good or better an education right in your own backyard. And while these schools don’t have the prestige of an Ivy League school, they probably deserve it.

While the Ivys still provide a good education, you want to go there for the connections, not the learning experience. If you are smart enough to use the networks, by all means go to Harvard. If you’d rather have the education nearer to home, maybe University of Arizona is better for you. Until the original Ivys regain their collective senses, the education you get at these schools may even be better.