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Savor your victory while you can, Harvard. We're coming for you Saturday.

Savor your victory while you can, Harvard. We're coming for you Saturday.

Classic Ivy League sports debate that no one actually plans on answering: Who is Princeton’s rival?

Some Tiger fans cling firmly to the geographical convenience of the supposed Penn-Princeton rivalry. Back in 2006, a columnist from the Daily Pennsylvanian noted that the rival stems almost exclusively from the two schools’ dominance of Ivy League basketball. But this year, Penn was just an obstacle standing in the way of the Tigers’ Ivy League run — the men beat the Quakers handily to force the one-game playoff against Harvard, and the women (who continue their ridiculously dominant streak, stretching all the way back to last season) absolutely trounced Penn in their final game of the regular season, 78-27 (no, that’s not a typo; it’s a 51 point win).

Aspirational sports fans, meanwhile, will tell you our rivals are Harvard and Yale, although neither school seems particularly interested in us. In a recent Deadspin article , a Harvard fan complained about choice of Yale as a “neutral site,” noting, “How is Harvard having to play at their fiercest rival’s court, where “neutral” fans that show up will automatically root against Harvard?” (Fair point, although the obvious counter would seem to be, everyone hates Harvard, so no where outside of Cambridge could ever be “neutral”.)

But this winter season, the games where we had the most to lose, and the contests we really cared about winning, were against Crimson athletes. And (here’s the shift), it seemed like this season, Harvard cared about us, too.

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If Goldman Sachs released tables of the best Ivy League universities at making money, Princeton would come second. (This is based on absolutely no analysis of the following figures.)

PRINCO, the Princeton University Investment Co., announced annual returns of 14.7 percent for the fiscal year of 2010 today. After last year’s return of -23.5 percent and this year’s big turnaround, Princeton’s endowment currently stands at $14.4 billion. Annualized returns for the past decade amount to 7.9 percent.

Yeah, cool, a nice chunk of change, whatever. But what bugs me is that Columbia posted returns of 17.3 percent (albeit on a $6.5 billion sum). At least we beat Harvard (11.4 percent increase to $27.4 billion) and Yale (8.9 percent increase to $16.7 billion).

Does that mean we can start getting more free stuff/study breaks/Lawnparties?

UPDATE: After some discussion, we decided that our judgments were rather more unsophisticated and flippantly worded than we think desirable.  For example: We should probably make it clear that IvyGate doesn’t hate Princeton.  And we don’t hate IvyGate.  And BLOG WARS!!! are, like, totally lame.

I used to really like IvyGate.

Now, I won’t go so far as a lot of people who say “it sucks now.” I mean, I still read it, but it’s just not what it used to be. You might remember their coverage of Aleksey Vayner (still one of the more hilarious things to happen at an Ivy in recent history), or their coverage of pre-frosh Facebook groups. Just, lately, it seems it’s lost that spark, or that particular cheeky wit that used to really pull me in.

Or it could just be that the whole thing reads like a Yale playbook.

Alex Klein, a Yale sophomore who’s one of the site’s current editors, reports on even the most minute of Yalie news. It’s understandable we’re going to get in-depth coverage from a school an editor attends, but the fact remains that not everyone’s down to read the Yale elections’ nitty-gritty. (Also: Something about gnomes, half of which I don’t understand.)

So I kind of miss the good ol’ days of the Gate, because the Princeton coverage has been, let’s face it, a little disappointing lately. Like, after the Lawnparties acts’ announcement, IvyGate threw up this short post:

The Undergraduate Student Whatever over at Princeton just announced that none other than Jimmy Fallon’s backing band will be performing, next Sunday, at an event called… “Lawnparties.” At a club called… “Quadrangle.”

I’m not sure what this “means” but something “tells” me it’s being “sarcastic” without any indication “why.” Does IvyGate hate Princeton? I think IvyGate hates Princeton.

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Students are gonna have to pay more to feed this guy.

Students are gonna have to pay more to feed this guy.

Yale students have always complained about how their financial aid pales in comparison to Princeton and Harvard’s.

In late February, they announced a 4.8% increase in tuition, and to compensate, they added a 10% increase in financial aid expenditures and guaranteed parents of students on aid would not receive any hike in the tuition bill.

It was all an effort to make Yale more appealing to antsy pre-frosh. But it left everyone wondering… what’s the catch?

A February 25 opinion piece in the Yale Daily News cut to the chase:

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Here it is:

- 2,148  out of 26,247 admitted for an 8.18% acceptance rate — falling from 9.94% in 2009 and 9.25 in 2008.  (Harvard admitted 6.9%, Yale 7.5%)

- 50% men, 50% women.

- 9.4 percent admitted identify as African American; 21.5 percent as Asian American; 10 percent as Hispanic or Latino; less than 1 percent as Native American

- Admitted students hail from all 50 states plus: Bangladesh, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Costa Rica, France, Greece, Guatemala, Iceland, India, Israel, Jamaica, Kenya, Morocco, Myanmar, Norway, Senegal, Turkey, Uganda, Vietnam and Zambia (and more).

- 1,451 students waitlisted.

In other news, the College Confidential forums have crashed.

High school seniors: If you don’t get the thick envelope, don’t feel too bad. Princeton is a trade school. …There is only Yale? Take it from Season 2 of Gossip Girl.

Fun fact: The teacher out to ruin Blair’s Yale dreams? That’d be senior Laura Breckenridge ’10. Oh, Princetonians! Always trying to deflate everyone else’s grades, too!

From the video:

“Maybe in time, I’ll get in trouble for not inflating grades like everyone else, Ms. Waldorf, but until then, I’ll give them based on merit.”

Sound familiar? But here’s the thing. At Princeton, grade deflation won’t stop you from getting into Yale — at least according to Yale Law School dean of admissions Rangappa ’96.

the boys in blue (source: yalebulldogs.com)

the boys in blue (source: yalebulldogs.com)

Cornell may have ended its historic March Madness run last night (read the NYTimes’s take on it here), but the Ivy League still lives strong in the NCAA. Next up: Yale’s hockey team is going up against North Dakota tomorrow afternoon in the Northeast regional semifinals. Yale was ranked No. 9 in the nation after an impressive season (20-9-3), and the game will be aired live on ESPN360.com and Fox Sports Net North at 5pm ET on Saturday. So shelve that Tiger pride, take a much-needed study break, and cheer on your fellow Ivy! Enjoy the weekend, everybody.

We dominate.

We dominate.

Yale has a few reasons to be ashamed of itself: We routinely beat them at the U.S. News and World Report game. Our application numbers soared this year while they saw 200 fewer suitors. Despite all this, there is one department in which Elis seem to be more…satisfied…than Princetonians.

It’s “Sex Week” at Yale, which means the Yale Daily News conducted and released a sex survey, pretty similar to the one The Daily Princetonian printed last month.

Let’s check the competition:

Percent of Men Who Claim to Have Had Sex:
Yale: 69.5%
Princeton: 62.4%

Percent of Women Who Claim to Have Had Sex:
Yale: 59.8%
Princeton: 51.0%

What could possibly account for Yale’s ability to beat us at this game? One Yale student says, “At the end of the day, you can get laid. … You’re not forced to see them on a daily basis so you can get away with it.” Is the problem just that Princeton is too small for this spirit of casual hookups to be acceptable? No. The problem must be deeper than that. Let’s look at some parallel discrepant figures:

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425px-Queen_Victoria_by_Bassano

If you keep reading, this picture will make sense

You’d think the New Yorker would be solidly in the tank for the ol’ Orange and Black.  Editor-in-Chief David Remnick ’81 didn’t teach himself, after all.

In recent years, however, Yale has been getting most of the love from this classiest of rags (see here and here and here).  But as long as the stories are as entertaining as this week’s take on the  timeless musical fantasia known as “That’s Why I Chose Yale,” we won’t complain.

A choice passage:

James Goodale, Class of ’55, and a former general counsel for the Times, made it through all seventeen minutes—more collegians bursting into song, accompanied by “Up with People”-style dance numbers, and even some electric-guitar shredding in the art gallery—before reporting that the production seemed “intended for an audience that I couldn’t divine.” He added, “My God, if you’re a hockey player, you think, I’ll go to Princeton.”

In other New Yorker-related news, apparently Princeton Politics Professor Gary Bass sometimes writes in to give his opinion on current cinema?  Most random New Yorker blog post about one of my former professors EVER…

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Emma Brown at Brown orientation, surrounded by giants. (From flixster.com)

Emma Watson at Brown orientation, surrounded by giants. (From flixster.com)

After only a two percent increase in applications for the Class of 2013, Princeton University has been pushing its hefty financial aid package–and it’s working.

The 19 percent jump in applications to Princeton this year was greater than that of Harvard (5 percent) and Yale (Not really a jump, more like a…tiny step backward.), prompting Bloomberg News to proclaim to the Internet: “Princeton Surge Beats Harvard, Yale as Applications Soar.” Hahaha, we won!

But why the competition? Why not some Ivy League bonhomie? Why must we always be bickering like over-privileged siblings in a race to be Mom’s favorite? Am I even allowed to use bicker in this context this time of the year?

So instead, let’s talk about Brown.

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"And that!, my friends, is how you make George Bush cry."

"And that!, my friends, is how you make George W. Bush weep."

If you haven’t heard of it already, Yale’s Admissions Office recently released a new video called “Why I Chose Yale.” Here it is.

Insane, right? Some blogs have called it “Why I Didn’t Choose Yale,” others are scratching their heads as to why this was created, and, naturally, Yalies are up in arms about it over at the Yale Daily News.

All that said… It is kind of cool, as far as university-created videos go. It’s incredibly well produced, obviously took a lot of effort to put together, and is, well, kind of enjoyable, in a way that most college admission videos aren’t. For those of you who’d rather not sit through the 16 minutes of High School Musical-inspired camp, here are some of the highlights:

  • Everything looks good. Seriously, put the video on mute and just see how nice Yale’s facilities are. (Residential colleges have their own gyms? What?)
  • Brian Williams completes a rhyme at 6:45. Damn. It’s cool.
  • At 6:15, a professor sings over a really awful “hard rock” guitar riff. It makes me uncomfortable.
  • 9:49 starts the worst part of the video, with the “academic” section. Imagine if all those people who brag about their internships and majors got a chance to sing their boasts over a cheesy guitar-and-strings pop riff with verses like, “Last year I spent the summer abroad / I helped to monitor a foreign election / And now I volunteer at a law school clinic on human rights protection” and “I came to Yale from across the world because I wanted a global education / Now I’m bringing cleaner water to the countries that need it through the H20 Africa Foundation.”
  • Just read the above point again, because it’s hilarious and so gruesomely corny, and not in the way that Yale intended. It’s more like intellectual masturbation, set to awful music.

So, you’re thinking, Yale made a video that’s effectively tarnished their storied reputation with a level of self-congratulatory kitsch unseen in the Ivy League’s long history. Big whoop…

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  stress of exams got you down? time to wallow in some bad karma!  [source: ArtMechanic]

stress of exams got you down? time to wallow in some bad karma! [source: ArtMechanic

As we slog on through the sheer hellishness that is reading period, complete with the perfunctory stupidity from old friends at home (“Why do you have your exams now? That’s just so…weird!”), I took comfort in getting an email from my dad today asking whether I thought he should interview prospective Harvard kids.

Yep, folks: the college interview season has begun for those sad souls out there who get to tear their hair out in pursuit of the perfect Ivy, and I must admit it’s really providing me with some much-needed schadenfreude.  Sure, we’re locked in Firestone from dawn till dusk and it feels like we haven’t seen a proper night’s sleep since the Stone Age—but hey, look on the bright side!  At least we don’t have to get dressed up for interviews with preppy millionaires who enjoy nothing more than crushing our hopes and dreams!

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