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Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | The New Republic

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In the spring of 2008, I did a daylong stint on the Yale admissions committee. We—that is, three admissions staff, a member of the college dean’s office, and me, the faculty representative—were going through submissions from eastern Pennsylvania. The applicants had been assigned a score from one to four, calculated from a string of figures and codes—SATs, GPA, class rank, numerical scores to which the letters of recommendation had been converted, special notations for legacies and diversity cases. The ones had already been admitted, and the threes and fours could get in only under special conditions—if they were a nationally ranked athlete, for instance, or a “DevA,” (an applicant in the highest category of “development” cases, which means a child of very rich donors). Our task for the day was to adjudicate among the twos. Huge bowls of junk food were stationed at the side of the room to keep our energy up. The junior officer in charge, a young man who looked to be about 30, presented

The New Republic , for better or worse, has had the Ivy Leagues in its blood since the very beginning: The magazine’s three founders went to Harvard, Harvard, and Penn, respectively. And it’s safe to say that when this essay by then–Yale professor William Deresiewicz was published a decade ago, at least half the staff had graduated from an Ivy League school. So it was rather controversial for TNR, of all publications, to depict a burning Harvard flag on its cover and implore its readers—many of whom, likewise, were Ivy League graduates—not to send their children to the country’s elite schools.

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