A Peek Inside the Ivy: Brown and Cornell Tie for 'Worst' Ivy League College
Welcome to A Peek Inside the Ivy, a weekly look at what’s happening at America’s elite institutions, where the students are just like you. Except, you know, they go to an Ivy League school.
News of the Week:
What else is new? All eight Ivies in the top 15 of US News Best Colleges ranking
Princeton was named the top college in America, just ahead of Harvard in the latest US News ranking, considered by many the ultimate honor, if you’re into those kind of things. Yale was #4, Columbia #5 and UPenn #8. Dartmouth just missed the top 10 at #11 while Brown and Cornell are looking pretty shabby tied all the way down at #14.
Try to do better next year, OK guys?
62% of Yale professors think it’s too easy to get an A
The Yale Daily News surveyed members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ 53 academic programs and departments and found that grade inflation is concern among the people who actually hand out those grades.
Philosophy professor Shelly Kagan told the News: “We are doing a disservice to our students, if we pretend that this much of the work being submitted is that good. How can they tell how to get better, if we pretend that everything is already at the highest level we can reasonably ask for?”
Time to break out those red pens and start handing out some Cs?
Are Ivy League schools discriminating against Asians?
An editorial by Walter E. Williams — an economics professor at George Mason Univeristy — published in Newsweek at the end of August actually asks “Why Are Ivy League Schools Still Discriminating Against Asians?”
Williams cites the case of Austin Jia, who, according to Williams, “graduated from high school and had a nearly perfect score of 2340 out of 2400 possible points on the new SAT. His GPA was 4.42, and he had taken 11 Advanced Placement courses in high school… His applications for admission were rejected at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia universities, as well as at the University of Pennsylvania.”
Williams reports that, “Jia said that his rejection was particularly disturbing when certain classmates who had lower scores but were not Asian-American like him were admitted to those Ivy League schools.”
Read Williams’ whole argument here.
Quote of the Week:
“Is this mumps again? Why do weird diseases keep spreading on our campus?”
-Harvard’s Ali Dastjerdi ’19, reacting to the news that several cases of Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease had been confirmed on Harvard’s campus.
Tweet of the Week:
Is this what Harvard is like? pic.twitter.com/yyAJ4Spqgu
— Big Uzi Vert (@BlvckGrip) September 12, 2017