Beware, what follows is an unadulterated piece of Eli snobbery straight from the Yale Daily News. Read only after taking the necessary precautions:
"Dartmouth announced it would increase its annual financial-aid budget by $10 million, to $71 million. In contrast, Yale's initiative will boost the University's aid budget $24 million, to $86 million, while Harvard's new aid policy will cost an additional $22 million per year, leaving Harvard's aid budget at $120 million. Additionally, Dartmouth will now admit international students without taking into account their ability to pay. Yale, Harvard and Princeton University already offer need-blind admissions for both domestic and international students."
These statements have a great deal to say about the sorry state of the Ivy League, if indeed it can be called that. The eight constituent colleges compete to outdo each other more often than they create some semblance of cohesion that would warrant use of the term "league." In this cutthroat frenzy, even the noble pursuit of making college affordable for everyone seems to amount to nothing more than a pissing contest.
No, this sort of competition is not the sort that brings out the best in us, forcing us to strive to some higher ideal; this type of competition is detrimental to every party involved. What's lost is the distinctive character that each college possesses which -- as idealistic as it may sound -- should be the most important factor in choosing a college.
A Harvard degree looks pretty on paper, but is it worth four years if you hate the people there? Rankings only tell part of the story.
For example, take the standards set by most national college rankings, in which Dartmouth gets the short end of the stick. Despite the fact that we have decidedly undergraduate-oriented academics and a distinctive social life, we are still ranked against other full-blown research universities. We lose points because we don't invest billions of dollars in particle accelerators, orbiting satellites and other fancy machines for graduate students like the other Ivies. To be honest, I'm shocked that we've managed 11th place in the US News and World Report rankings.
Though the "Dartmouth Experience" may be a horribly vague and oft-abused term, it's impossible to boil our College down to percentiles and ratings. How does one convert a DOC Trip into a numerical ranking or the environment outside of campus into a graph? Is it even possible to determine the "best" college given the diverse tastes of students across the nation? If you hate big cities, would you consider Columbia under any circumstances?
Each and every year we're bombarded by more and more statistics that tell us of Dartmouth's increasing prestige. Look back to last week when the statistics about the Class of 2012 were processed. Losing no time, admissions officials quickly took to the highest towers and began trumpeting the glorious 11 percent increase in applications -- a new record! What does it mean, though? Sure, there's been a fun lawsuit to attract attention, but I'm more prepared to tack this milestone to the simple fact that there are more people applying this year in general than last, making this statistic nothing special at all.
While I agree with Evan Meyerson '08's argument that our selectivity forced many deserving top students to attend the "New Ivies" ("The Paradox of Selectivity," Feb. 7), this does not necessarily entail a positive change. Supposedly these schools offer all of the Ivy education minus the WASP prudishness, but they all are still trying to emulate the structure of the large Ivy research universities. Essentially, more schools are now being swept into the maelstrom of expensive, bland colleges that the Ivies started. Resistance is futile: you will be assimilated.
Let's have everyone take a step back from the Ivy League for a moment and try to cultivate their own collegiate image instead of trying to be just like Harvard. Then we can return to our plethora of absurd internal conflicts, and Yale can finally look somewhere else for its misguided ego-trips.
