The Times reported yesterday that in the face of shrinking endowments, universities are increasingly choosing wealthier applicants that can foot the full ticket of an education over students that would need financial aid if admitted.
Coupled with the fact that Ivies’ (and other selective college’s) acceptance rates are dropping, high school juniors across the nation have collectively just sighed a massive “fuck my life.”
(image © Hasbro)
Today’s New York Times ran an article heralding the new Dartmouth College president, Dr. Jim Yong Kim (full story here). What caught our attention, though, was the headline: “Dartmouth Selects Its New President from Harvard.” An Ivy League president with ties to (gasp!) a different Ivy?
There’s something unique about that Crimson, though, that makes the Times’ college-cum-university presidential supercenter inference especially apt. Kim’s hiring will make three out of the seven Ivy League presidents educated at some point at Harvard. For those of you at home keeping score, Penn’s Amy Gutmann got her B.A. from Radcliffe and her Ph.D. from Harvard and Brown’s Ruth Simmons received a Ph.D. from Harvard.
Granted, Dr. Kim is inextricably linked to Harvard: in addition to working as an official at Harvard Med School, he got his Ph.D. in Anthropology and his M.D. at Harvard. But the article buries that fact that Kim also went to Brown undergrad, in the same paragraph that mentions his football prowess at his Iowa high school (he was a quarterback).
What consolation is there for us at Princeton? Well, three out of the seven Ivy presidents have at some point taught here: Gutmann, Simmons, and of course Shirley. So we’ve got that going for us.
Someone had too much at breakfast
Larry Summers, head of Obama’s National Economic Council and once-beloved Harvard president, attended yesterday’s “fiscal sustainability summit” in the White House. For the event, Obama convened over a hundred policy makers and intellectuals to discuss bipartisan approaches to deficit reduction.
If anyone was wondering why Larry was a bit quiet during the whole thing, well, the Financial Times reports that “Lawrence Summers . . . fell asleep on the podium.” Falling asleep in the audience is understandable, sure, but the podium? It’s enough to make Rick Santelli mad!
The good news for students is that apparently Harvard’s unofficial motto now extends to the White House: “The hard part is getting in.”
(image source: huffingtonpost.com)
& 
As Barack Obama prepares to take the highest office in the United States, he has begun to build a team of accomplished and skillful men and women that will help the young president lead America in these most troubled times.
Indeed, America stands at a crossroads in history, and Obama’s star-studded team hopes to answer some of the nation’s most pressing questions. How does America weather the recession? How does the nation withdraw its troops from Iraq? Which Ivy League school is really the best?
Come on. You thought it wouldn’t be a competition?
People have already noted that Obama’s team is noticeably “Ivy-tinged”. This, of course, begs the question that burns constantly in the American public mind:
Which of the “Ancient Eight” comes out on top?
