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#Post#: 295--------------------------------------------------
The Ivy League, and why MIT is not "an Ivy League
school."
DIR By: Dan Smith
Date: May 3, 2018, 3:37 pm
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The phrase "Ivy League" refers specifically to Harvard, Yale,
Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown, the University of
Pennsylvania, and Cornell.
It does not mean "the best in academics," although they are all
excellent universities and Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are
often at the very top. Still, by academics, Stanford, MIT,
CalTech, Duke, and the University of Chicago are comparable to
the Ivy League schools, but are not in the Ivy League.
In the United States we like to pretend we are a classless
society, so there is a kind of conspiracy not to talk too much
about the class and social prestige aspects of this group of
universities. And it is true that the class aspects are much
less important today than they were a hundred, or even fifty
years ago.
Nevertheless. If you check a map, you will see that all of the
schools are geographically in the Northeast (Harvard in
Massachusetts; Yale in Connecticut; Princeton in New Jersey;
Dartmouth in New Hampshire; Brown in Rhode Island; Columbia and
Cornell in New York state); University of Pennsylvania in, of
course, Pennsylvania. Most of them are historically among the
oldest in the nation. The Northeast was traditionally the oldest
and wealthiest part of the country.
Up until perhaps 1900 or so, all of them but Cornell were
formally connected with Protestant religions denominations; and
they were the favored schools used by the wealthy.
In short, the Ivy League used to be thought of as collection of
"WASP"--white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant--institutions.
The term "Ivyemerged in the 1920s, and was formalized as the
name of an athletic conference. These schools play against each
other in college football games. Strictly speaking, that is what
the "Ivy League" means: college sports.
All of them based admission on a combination of criteria which
always included the "family" applicants came from. That is,
Harvard would not only consider an applicant's academic
credentials, but also his "lineage." To be fair, they did not
limit applicants to any social group and actually tried to
include a wide geographic range, and to provide financial
assistance so that they were not limited to wealthy applicants.
Nevertheless, you were and I think still are much more likely to
be admitted to Harvard if your father and grandfather attended
Harvard.
As far as I know, MIT's admissions have always been very
egalitarian and merit-based.
And MIT has always been--in the phrase used when I attended in
the 1960s--"a university polarized around science."
#Post#: 476--------------------------------------------------
Re: The Ivy League, and why MIT is not "an Ivy League
school."
DIR By: Truman Overby
Date: May 7, 2018, 9:55 am
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"And it is true that the class aspects are much less important
today than they were a hundred, or even fifty years ago."
No way I can agree with that, Dan. There may an appearance of
that but the reality is that we are very much a class-based
society here in the US. In fact we have the terms 'lower class'
'middle class' and 'upper class.' Each of these classes are of
course further delineated by three divisions; lower, middle and
upper.
#Post#: 668--------------------------------------------------
Re: The Ivy League, and why MIT is not "an Ivy League
school."
DIR By: Dan Smith
Date: May 10, 2018, 2:09 pm
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I won't argue, Jerry... these things are hard to track, and
statistics of "social mobility" suggest that we're more
stratified than we used to be.
For a long time I struggled on Wikipedia with people who kept
wanting to say that their university was "prestigious."
Eventually I gave up. What nobody wanted to admit was that
"prestige" was actually social prestige, not academic
excellence. It comes up in debates over whether the cost of a
Harvard tuition has a good return on investment. I have no doubt
at all that there are places where a Harvard or Princeton degree
will give you an edge over the University of California at
Berkeley, or Cornell, and it's pretty hard to measure whether
it's more or less than it was in the 1960s. But whenever I
suggest that social prestige is a factor, I get shouted down so
I settle for saying "less than it used to be."
But I think it is less. I don't think the "WASP establishment"
(WASP being an acronym for "white, Anglo-Saxon,
Protestant,"--coined by a sociologist named E. Digby Baltzell,
who was himself a WASP) has the same power it used to have...
just as the membership in the "mainline Protestant"
denominations has declined.
By the way, for any non-US bystanders reading this... the very
name "E. Digby Baltzell," just the name alone, is instantly
recognized by a US native as very likely being the name of a
"white, Anglo-Saxon protestant from an old family that was
probably a part of 'the Establishment.'"
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