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.

First and most obviously, there’s the ubiquitous Harvard-Princeton basketball game this Saturday. The New York Times wrote a big feature on the Harvard team last week. The guys on PTI debated the merits of the Ivy League hoopsters. Catherine Ettman has been frantically emailing the student body with information on how to get tickets. This. Is. A. Big. Deal.

But the basketball season has been less a question of historic rivalries and more a matter of who has the top two teams in the league this year. Harvard’s Keith Wright won Ivy League player of the year; Princeton’s Kareem Maddox won Defensive Player of the Year. Both were unanimous first team all-Ivy League; two more Tigers, Dan Mavraides and Ian Hummer, were named to the second team.

Simply put, these are the two best teams in the league — if Dartmouth happened to be really good this year, we’d be talking about potential Princeton-Dartmouth rivalries. Yeah, it’s a little sweeter to get the win over Harvard. But at the end of the day, winning the League and going to the Big Dance is sweeter than beating whomever you had to in order to get there.

No; the real rivalry against Harvard this season was not on the court but rather in the pool. Princeton swimming and diving, the two-time defending Ivy League champions, lost to Harvard earlier this year in the annual Harvard-Yale-Princeton tournament. The same day the men’s basketball team lost at Harvard, the men’s swimming team was at the Harvard pool competing for the Ivy League tournament and looking for a little revenge. They won the meet by 5.5 points, a ridiculously tiny margin (for reference, Princeton had 1400 points and Harvard had 1394.5 — a different finish in any of the races could have been enough to turn the tables).

Unlike basketball, where Harvard’s rise is a change from recent years, Ivy League swimming has been dominated in recent memory by these two squads. Harvard and Princeton don’t just care about winning — they care about beating the other team.

But swimming is the rare true rivalry against Harvard. And at the end of the day, does anyone care if Princeton lacks an official, agreed upon rival? We keep competing for Ivy League titles, and keep having to beat the best each year to do it. This year it’s Harvard that’s standing in our way. Next year maybe it’ll be someone different. As long as we’re in the mix for the title, I won’t care who we’re playing.

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?

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.

At any rate, it looks like commenters over at IvyGate are starting to get a little tired of the new angle:

I am a Yale student and even *I* think this is an absurdly Yale-specific post. NONE of the other schools have their elections covered in such great depth.
Welcome to YaleGate, folks.

(And maybe we won’t mention the fact that Klein endorsed Yale College Council candidates on the blog, including one of his friends whose campaign video he was featured in, without disclosing any relationships with them. Oops.)

We’re not calling out IvyGate. We’re not even saying it’s consistently bad. We’re just hoping they up their game to what it used to be. Oh, right, and quit posting so much about Yale.

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:

More stealthily hidden in his announcement was a much more insidious change: a 15 percent increase in the “self-help” requirement of students on financial aid — from $2,600 this year to $3,000 next.

So, Yalies have to work more hours to finance their own education. And an opinion piece in today’s YDN points to the injustice of a bulked-up student contribution level, which the article calls, “a decision made without public student input”:

This 15 percent increase in term-time self-help increases the financial pressure on students who already work hard to finance their own education. As Ryan Nees ’12 noted (“‘Self-help’ slams students,” Feb. 25), at the average student wage, these students would have to work an extra hour and 15 minutes each week to account for the hike — in turn limiting their ability to participate most fully in campus life and increasing their likelihood of accumulating substantial debt.

Plus, since Yale is already struggling to provide aid packages as seductive as Princeton and Harvard’s, it bodes worse that the $400 increase in student contribution requirements puts them at a $3,000 contribution level, significantly higher than Harvard’s ($2,500) and our own ($2,345).

- 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.

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)

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.

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:

Average GPAs (2008)
Yale: 3.51
Princeton: 3.28

There it is. Yale’s ability to outsex us can be explained with the very same reason they have higher GPAs than us: Inflation.

(Image Source: http://blogs.princeton.edu/paw/2009/11/yale_pre.html)

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… The subject is The Young Victoria, a no-doubt sumptuously costumed historical romance starring British bombshell Emily Blunt — and whether it holds any appeal for the male segment of the viewing public.  Professor Bass writes in to say:

I’m a guy and I liked “Young Victoria” too, and not just for Emily Blunt. [Queen Victoria's husband] Albert was an antislavery activist, and Victoria drove Disraeli barking mad with newspaper clippings about the killing of baby seals and, in 1876, Bulgarian civilians.

But what does he think about Victoria’s chances of winning the Oscar for Best Costume Design?  If you ask me, it’ll face some stiff competition from Bright Star, an equally sumptuous period piece featuring a winsome heroine who just happens to work as… a costume designer.  But I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise.  Perhaps a trip to GBass’s office hours will provide some clarity?  I’ll report back.

(image source: wikipedia.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.

Brown’s applications rose 20 percent from last year, and no one knows why! They didn’t even change their recruitment strategy to promote any more “college-student contact” or “URM outreach” or…or…College Confidential, help me out here!

Brown, with its 20 percent jump in applications to about 30,000, didn’t do anything differently this year, James Miller, director of admission, said in an interview. The increase was bigger than expected at the university in Providence, Rhode Island.

“We’ve had to take over a larger space on campus to do sorting and tracking and filing,” Miller said.

Oh, but I know why.

from wordpress.com

Because what really matters at the end of the day, Lauren Edelson, is how much your college resembles Hogwarts.