> Deresiewicz says essentially the same thing, urging students to flee the Ivy League in favor of smaller colleges like Wesleyan, Reed and Grinnell, where the students are more passionate and receptive...<p>This is terrible advice and simply not true. I went to a small, solidly ranked liberal arts school. Most of the students also drank incredibly hard; they had little regard for academics; and while it was true that you could always get in contact with a professor, the faculty was of a far lower quality than you would find at an ivy league university. Research opportunities were also non-existent.<p>> where the students are ... less prone to unseemly résumé-padding<p>It's certainly true that my school did not emphasize résumé-padding, and the end result was that none of my friends who majored in STEM related fields got into top graduate programs, and none of my friends / anyone else I knew outside of such fields achieved meaningful employment following graduation.
<i>> Economics, conversely, is as popular as beer, topping all majors at Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton and Penn. In what Deresiewicz calls “a stunning convergence,” it was the top major at 26 of the nation’s top 40 universities and colleges.</i><p>In a society that sets up severe and aggressive punishments for having less money than someone else, why would anyone go into any other field? Only the masochists and the selfless will be outside the world of finance soon.
As far as access to professors; I went to a school with approximately 30k undergraduates. There were some phenomenal professors there, and if you merely showed up to one of their talks and take an interest and you immediately stood out to them.<p>Going by my data-point of one school, it's not particularly hard to get interaction with professors, even when nearly all the freshman classes are taught by TAs.<p>I got to meet and interact with some wonderful physicists, just by being interested in what they had to say. I wonder if it is easier or harder to do that at an Ivy.
Research and business benefit from pooling the best talent in one place. So what if some students get in from legacy or money. That's a price paid to have a large endowment at your disposal.<p>Sounds like the authors of the article and the books referenced are just jealous of Ivy League students. Students joining frats? Glad they don't do that at lesser universities.
This article hits on some good points, but it conflates two separate issues:<p>1. The quality of education at Ivy League schools isn't living up to the hype (and cost) of their "brand".<p>2. Fraternities are a destructive force in the lives of college students.<p>I actually agree with both points, but they are, in fact, unrelated to each other.
I imagine all of those Valedictorians moving on to Ivy League status are simply gathering the benefits of a childhood designed to make them subservient, unquestioning, and anything but self-determined. Of course they end up vomiting in frat basements. They're dumped into adulthood without an iota of experience of being a human being. How are they supposed to know what to do when no one is telling them exactly what to do with every moment of their day for the first time in their entire lives?