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Ivy League Schools Sure Look Like a Cartel

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Re: Ivy League Schools Sure Look Like a Cartel

#131

Post by nine_k »

coldtea wrote: post #110
tophi wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A university is not just a place to go to learn anymore. It’s a big club that happens to be a place where you study. You bond and make lifelong friends. Also a great place to find a partner for life. Athletic departments are vital to the university system in American schools and their local economies.

> A university is not just a place to go to learn anymore. It’s a big club that happens to be a place where you study. Yes. That should stop. > Athletic departments are vital to the university system in American schools and their local economies. That too.

As cost of university education spirals out of control, I expect that different forms of education, producing comparable levels of knowledge without all the expensive frills, will emerge, and be accepted by most employers. Of course places like MIT or Stanford won't be affected. A lot of smaller-caliber colleges will be.

Re: Ivy League Schools Sure Look Like a Cartel

#132

Post by pyuser583 »

lofatdairy wrote: post #60

Cui bono? There are a lot of problems with the Ivy League, the lack of athletic scholarships are one of the few things they do absolutely right. The thing is that athletics are less, not more democratic as a distribution mechanism for admission slots. The author seems to be under the mistaken belief that most of these slots would be available for your football and basketball players, where stories of rising from pove…

Yes but what about academic back doors?

I was admitted to a college because I was really interested in a major they started offering and wanted to promote.

I just got one of my children admitted to a very selective private school because “wanted” to participate in a program they had just begun.

Schools always have programs and initiatives they are pushing, and give preference to students who want to use them.

Re: Ivy League Schools Sure Look Like a Cartel

#133

Post by bee_rider »

coldtea wrote: post #110
tophi wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A university is not just a place to go to learn anymore. It’s a big club that happens to be a place where you study. You bond and make lifelong friends. Also a great place to find a partner for life. Athletic departments are vital to the university system in American schools and their local economies.

> A university is not just a place to go to learn anymore. It’s a big club that happens to be a place where you study. Yes. That should stop. > Athletic departments are vital to the university system in American schools and their local economies. That too.

You could learn most things in a library for free. One of the big advantages of a University is being around other ambitious people at the same point in their career. The “big club” aspect is an important part of the value proposition.

We should definitely dump athletic departments, though, they are completely unrelated to the mission.

Re: Ivy League Schools Sure Look Like a Cartel

#134

Post by pyuser583 »

lofatdairy wrote: post #66
brian_cunnie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has historical roots in excluding Jewish students I'm glad the Ivy (Penn) that I graduated from over thirty years ago was enlightened enough to admit good students regardless of whether they were Jewish. Or Asian. > athletics has been a backdoor for admissions ... used to exclude ... those outside the upper class. The student athlete I knew, my roommate Tony Tomaska, was the son of a Chicago policeman. He played…

I do recommend the Third Reich in the Ivy League as a generally good read, which highlights the significantly more nazi-sympathetic student body at harvard with the more activist population at Columbia, largely in part due to the fact that Columbia failed to attract the white elites of NYC and had a larger Jewish population as a result. >The student athlete I knew, my roommate Tony Tomaska, was the son of a Chicago p…

I’m familiar with some very creepy attitudes the local land grant college had toward Nazi Germany.

Was this an Ivy League thing or a higher ed thing?

Much of the early 20th century was spent building US higher education around the German model.

Re: Ivy League Schools Sure Look Like a Cartel

#135

Post by pyuser583 »

fsckboy wrote: post #117
brian_cunnie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has historical roots in excluding Jewish students I'm glad the Ivy (Penn) that I graduated from over thirty years ago was enlightened enough to admit good students regardless of whether they were Jewish. Or Asian. > athletics has been a backdoor for admissions ... used to exclude ... those outside the upper class. The student athlete I knew, my roommate Tony Tomaska, was the son of a Chicago policeman. He played…

The post WWII period was a golden age for social progress. Along with the final collapse of colonial empires ruled over by royal families came a corresponding breaking down of class and overt ethnic/racial barriers in the West and America, with universities using test scores to open their doors to students of merit regardless of background or gender. but that golden age, having achieved remarkable success, is over. I…

Did life improve in the post-colonial world? There don’t seem to be too many 1950s era success stories in this regard.

Re: Ivy League Schools Sure Look Like a Cartel

#136

Post by pyuser583 »

jalla wrote: post #33
TrackerFF wrote: post #25

Athletic scholarships is one of those very foreign concepts, for us outside the US. Seems like a uniquely (North) American thing?

Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College in the UK admit students and provide benefits, scholarships and bursaries to people that are considered world class rowing talent, quietly and unofficially. Many European countries have special programs for sports talents to develop and receive economic benefits whilst serving military service and/or seeking higher education. Most people don't know anything about these programs…

Don’t they have some kind of arrangements for choral singers?

Re: Ivy League Schools Sure Look Like a Cartel

#137

Post by pyuser583 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #55

Surprised the article does not discuss the much more impactful fact that Ivy’s coordinate to not provide merit scholarships . Columbia does a bit of defection on the side that is tolerated, but otherwise there are no merit scholarships for Ivy league students.

This makes sense though - using conventional criteria, all students would qualify for it.

Better to just offer according to needs.

Re: Ivy League Schools Sure Look Like a Cartel

#138

Post by oarabbus_ »

stale2002 wrote: post #129
oarabbus_ wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Still has a significantly smaller effect on the market than a bunch of education institutions coming together to collude. Citation needed. Again, the vast majority of Division 1 schools offer athletic scholarship. Where is this large collusion effect?

> Citation needed. I am not sure if you were aware, but there are a lot of houses in the world. In comparison, there aren't nearly as many high end, elite educational institutions. I think that you are more than capable of finding a citation yourself that proves that there are quite a lot more houses in the world, than there are top educational institutions.

>I am not sure if you were aware, but there are a lot of houses in the world.

>In comparison, there aren't nearly as many high end, elite educational institutions.

The college enrollment rate is under 70%, and I am not sure if you were aware, but the percentage of people in homes is much greater than this.

I mean, you just proved the point I was making. High-end, elite, Division 1 schools overwhelmingly offer athletic scholarships, vs not offering them. Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, and UC Berkeley have greater student enrollment than all the ivy leagues combined. People always try to do mental gymnastics with some "any non-Ivy League is by definition not an elite school" but using any objective ranking measure, just add Georgetown, UCLA, Notre Dame, UNC, Michigan, and suddenly the enrollment of athletic-scholarship-offering schools are >10x that of the ones that don't offer them.

You're making rather wild unsubstantiated claims at this point ("# houses > # schools == ivy leagues have greater impact") after repeatedly failing to demonstrate how HOA is not a good analogy to this situation. Comically these claims are completely false - over 25% of the USA lives in HOA communities, but nowhere near that many D1 schools (and even less by enrollment) does not offer athletic scholarships. Congrats, you inadvertently proved that Ivies not giving academic scholarships has a negligible effect, especially compared to housing.

Re: Ivy League Schools Sure Look Like a Cartel

#139

Post by Beldin »

caddemon wrote: post #128
tophi wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A university is not just a place to go to learn anymore. It’s a big club that happens to be a place where you study. You bond and make lifelong friends. Also a great place to find a partner for life. Athletic departments are vital to the university system in American schools and their local economies.

I get the value of the major D1 college sports teams in the university experience, but honestly who gives a shit if Harvard is good at golf or not? I don't imagine anyone outside of people on the e.g. squash team are impacted by squash at Harvard. Same goes for non-elite (in the socioeconomic sense) sports like track and field. I love sports and I think we need more opportunities for recreational play of sports after…

I would actually argue the opposite. Sports clubs are a great way for students to bond, to socialise, and to organise - not the only one, but around here, clearly an alternative to traditional student clubs and study associations.

This is fine and dandy for up to middling levels of achievement. But universities have no business being in professional sports. They do have a business accommodating professional athletes of a variety of sports, but that's where the mid-level sports clubs come in: enough decent facilities to stay in shape, but not required to provide Olympic-level of training.

If sports clubs want to aim higher, it's up to their (student-run) board to get there. Basically: universities should provide decent facilities, not run the teams.

Re: Ivy League Schools Sure Look Like a Cartel

#140

Post by nobodyandproud »

stale2002 wrote: post #39
nobodyandproud wrote: post #13

The author seems to have an axe to grind. > The need for diversity in education is as vital today as ever. But it’s not clear whether the Ivy Agreement’s ban on athletic scholarships actually promotes that end. One might even wonder whether, by not competing over sports stars, the schools are reducing the diversity of their student bodies. Yet later admits: > But recent research tells us that fielding a great team pr…

You are missing the point. It is not a problem of an individual school refusing to give academic scholarships. Instead the problem is the schools all agreeing together to do this. By all means, let each university individually choose if they want to allow scholarships or not, with zero agreement between the schools.

Then why the long rambling on the moral outcome?

It can be both true that the collusion is legally shaky—I’m not disputing that—and the author has an axe to grind.

I believe the writer wants a particular outcome for reasons beyond just forbidding collusion.

Finally it’s also true that the DoE’s national accreditation can forbid athletic scholarships.

I personally believe it should, if we want higher education to be about cultivating knowledge and intellect again.

It may even drive out the big business that college sports has become, along with the administrative bloat to support it.

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