Sociologist Lauren Rivera of Northwestern spent two years researching the way elite financial and law firms really select their new hires. The original paper is behind a sciencedirect paywall, but Bryan Caplan has a nice write-up about the results. You're much better off with a degree from a tippy-top school than just any Ivy -- but they don't actually care about what you learned there. Your grades don't matter that much as long as they're not bad. Climbing a famous mountain or making a varsity team, especially if you're nationally competitive, would be wise. And oh yeah -- they do care what you got on your SATs. More reax from the Chronicle of Higher Ed and physicist Steve Hsu.
posted by escabeche on Nov 20, 2011 - 152 comments

Between 1967 and 1973, a program called The Foundation Years brought fifteen young African-American men from Chicago's West Side to Dartmouth College. The students were gang members, most of them Vice Lords.
posted by catlet on Aug 26, 2011 - 19 comments

An oldie, but a goodie: Michael Lewis goes to Columbia's School of Journalism to see what such schools actually do to prepare their students.
posted by reenum on Dec 28, 2010 - 16 comments

Inspired by photographer T. Hayashida's book Take Ivy, a collection of images of (largely white) Ivy-league students of the 1960s, style bloggers Joshua Kissi and Travis Gumbs of Street Etiquette reimagine the book as The Black Ivy, where the race lines are flipped and the dapper dial is cranked up to 11.
posted by emilyd22222 on Sep 19, 2010 - 21 comments

"No one guessed the truth, which was simpler, and therefore stranger, than their wildest theories: that the scared young woman so hotly pursued by South Carolina police, the Secret Service, federal marshals and even the U.S. Army was actually on a bizarre and misguided journey of self-discovery." Rolling Stone reports on the strange case of Esther Reed: The Girl Who Conned The Ivy League. (via Metachat)
posted by The Whelk on Jan 17, 2010 - 46 comments

William Deresiewicz examines the pitfalls of an Ivy League education Apparently, the Ivies prepare you for... mediocrity.
posted by roomthreeseventeen on Jun 18, 2008 - 188 comments

MeFi's celebration of the Ivy League continues with "The Facebook of Wall Street's Future," a New York Times map of social and professional connections in the tradition of They Rule (previously on Metafilter here, here , here and here). [more inside]
posted by GrammarMoses on Jan 14, 2008 - 25 comments

ONE AFTERNOON IN THE LATE 1970's, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and stumbled upon something shocking and disturbing.

Shocking, because what he found was an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side and rear poses. Disturbing, because on closer inspection the photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual: sticking out from the spine of each and every body was a row of sharp metal pins. The case of the Ivy League posture photos.
posted by alphanerd on Jul 13, 2004 - 34 comments

Princeton University Eating Clubs A walk down Princeton's Prospect Avenue leads visitors to illustrious clubs like The Tiger Inn and Colonial Club. Ramen be damned!
posted by keli on Nov 8, 2003 - 19 comments

The Ivy League pop stars! Gossipy article reveals how universities throughout the USA are frantically fighting each other in order to attract celebrity professors. Niall Ferguson, Deirdre (born Donald) McCloskey and Saul Bellow ("teaching load: one course a year") are some examples. Considering these people are already engaged in their own love affair with the public eye (book tours, book deals, media events etc), are they the best choice from the academic point of view? Do traditional universities really have to resort to namedropping? And just between us, anybody out there ever had or currently has classes with bigwigs that turned out to be really fascinating or really disappointing? first link via those elitists from aldaily
posted by 111 on Jul 14, 2003 - 36 comments

Budget cuts threatening your college athletic team? No problem. Raise $210,000 on eBay.
posted by SandeepKrishnamurthy on Dec 4, 2002 - 7 comments

Scramble bands. The Ivy League (as well as other U.S. universities, typically with bad football teams) have a notorious tradition of marching bands that don't march. Columbia's band recently got in hot water (again) for a swipe at the Catholic church during a Fordham game. Did you play in the marching band at your college? More importantly, did you play a real instrument? Me, I blew bubbles and played the squeegee mop at Columbia.
posted by mkultra on Oct 7, 2002 - 28 comments

Princeton admissions officers broke into Yale's admissions system using prospective students' birth dates and Social Security numbers. They "viewed Yale admissions decisions" of 11 students; Princeton's dean of admissions says "[i]t was really an innocent way for us to check out the security." The FBI is "assessing the information to see if there is a federal violation."
posted by realityblurred on Jul 25, 2002 - 27 comments