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What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

washingtonpost.com

11–20 of 206 posts

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#11

Do enough people really have a subscription to the Washington Post? Or is this trending purely because a lot of people agree with the opinionated title?

I have one. You get like 6mo free if you sign up with a Prime account and only $4/mo after that. I read more than a handful of great articles from them each month and that price seems fair.

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#12

Do enough people really have a subscription to the Washington Post? Or is this trending purely because a lot of people agree with the opinionated title?

No subscription is needed to read the article. (However, the link is broken and leads to a page with no actual article; several people have commented with corrected URLs.)

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#13

Do enough people really have a subscription to the Washington Post? Or is this trending purely because a lot of people agree with the opinionated title?

Washington Post is some of the best investigative journalism going on right now at a mainstream media level.

NYT is just a rag in comparison.

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#14

The article ends with: It’s a system that polishes privilege, its byproduct a contempt for earned authority. Many of the people who started with this attitude had it ratified and encouraged by perhaps the most prestigious university in the world — and now they’re running the whole show. Emphasis on now added. Who in their right mind thinks people who attend Harvard and a handful of other elite universities and prep s…

Is Harvard really considered more prestigious than Oxford or Cambridge? That doesn't follow my perception.

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#15
post #5

Here's a working link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/0... The article is short, and only uses an anecdote to support its claim. While I can generally agree that places like Harvard work more in connections, networks, and money than intellectual rigor, the article is too short and missing enough detail to fall flat.

Link fixed, thanks.

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#16
I was a TA at Yale when I did my PhD there and I contrast that experience to when I was a TA at University of Calgary. Whether it’s a higher sense of entitlement or just grinding it out to maximize your official grade the contrast between these two schools was striking. At Yale you’d better think twice about honest grading because if you did there would be an army at your door with pitchforks ready. You then have to spend hours explaining why they didn’t deserve a higher grade. At the end of the day you’re worn down and there’s very little incentive to grade honestly as you get pain nearly nothing and you’re really there to finish your PhD.

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#17

I was a TA at Yale when I did my PhD there and I contrast that experience to when I was a TA at University of Calgary. Whether it’s a higher sense of entitlement or just grinding it out to maximize your official grade the contrast between these two schools was striking. At Yale you’d better think twice about honest grading because if you did there would be an army at your door with pitchforks ready. You then have to…

Did you get any different instructions for your grading at Yale? And doesn't such thing lead to large varying amounts of average grads per class?

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#18
post #5

Here's a working link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/0... The article is short, and only uses an anecdote to support its claim. While I can generally agree that places like Harvard work more in connections, networks, and money than intellectual rigor, the article is too short and missing enough detail to fall flat.

As a former undergrad, the points about grade inflation are 100% correct, and everything else is garbage.

> Many of the better-off young people at Harvard appeared to require intense favoritism to reassure them, perhaps because of the less-moneyed achievement and potential that loomed all around. Though some of the anointed developed their capabilities to the full, the institutional imperative to establish a hierarchy between them and us took precedence.

This is just utter nonsense. There are a lot of very legitimate ways that the school favors its privileged students (self selecting social clubs with dues, the disaster that is on campus dining, not subsidizing a whole lot of expenses that they ought to, forcing students on financial aid to work for the school, etc.) but the insinuation that the professors and other teachers at the school systematically favor privileged students in some sort of effort to reaffirm social hierarchy is totally unsubstantiated, and, quite frankly, a disgusting and slanderous accusation. I didn't like all (or even necessarily most) my professors/advisers/TAs that much, but I am honestly outraged on their behalf after reading this.

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#19

Do enough people really have a subscription to the Washington Post? Or is this trending purely because a lot of people agree with the opinionated title?

Yes. It's well worth it, both to receive the content hassle-free and to support their mission.

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#20

The article ends with: It’s a system that polishes privilege, its byproduct a contempt for earned authority. Many of the people who started with this attitude had it ratified and encouraged by perhaps the most prestigious university in the world — and now they’re running the whole show. Emphasis on now added. Who in their right mind thinks people who attend Harvard and a handful of other elite universities and prep s…

Is Harvard really considered more prestigious than Oxford or Cambridge? That doesn't follow my perception.

Quantifying prestige and definitively ranking the three is beyond me, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Harvard was considered more prestigious, in large part because it balances (reputationally speaking) "new-world dynamism" and "old-world prestige" better than Oxbridge does. The latter without the former has connotations of sclerotic inefficiency.
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