For the past few years, The New York Times’ college blog “The Choice” has profiled several high school seniors as they make the journey from boys to men, girls to women. Each year, six to eight aspirant collegians guest blog about their school search in a feature called “The Envelope, Please.” These youngsters come from a range of backgrounds, and are looking at schools all over the map. However, as we at IvyGate recently noticed, men who write for The Choice tend to have a little boost with a certain Cambridge based school.

That’s right, despite Harvard having one of the lowest admission rates in the country, out of the five young male contributors who applied, four got in. To put that in perspective, Harvard’s regular decision acceptance rate this year was 3.8%, but if you look at The Choice’s male guest bloggers, Harvard has taken 80% of them. Even factor in the two women who applied but didn’t make the cut, that’s still 57% of the applicants getting in to Harvard, a school that has prided itself on their single digit acceptance percentages.

So how did this happen? Is Harvard’s admissions office reading The Envelope, Please? Does The Choice have some magic crystal ball to find future Harvard admits? Or, is writing for the most famous newspaper in the world the answer to an increasingly competitive college application process everyone is trying to game?

Whatever the reason, it doesn’t actually seem to be working in Harvard’s favor. While Harvard’s yield for the class of 2016 was 81%, only one of their four chosen bloggers over the years decided to take the Crimson up on their offer. Again, to break it down into numbers, 81% for 2016ers, 25% of NYTers. Ouch. The other three decided to take their talents to Stanford, Yale, and, double ouch, Vanderbilt.

Meet The Dartmouth’s Nate Davis. Decked out in his baby blue bow tie and Ray-Ban sunglasses, he reports back to the Dartmouth community as “Heterosexual Correspondent” to On the Mark with Clark, a new video series. As Heterosexual Correspondent, Davis covers hard-hitting topics, (read: exclusive Kentucky Derby themed social events), asking the tough questions: “Whom are you wearing?,” “Do you know what preppy means?,” and “Seabiscuit or Equus? What’s your favorite piece of horse related art?”

Check out Davis’ introduction to The Dartmouth community below at three minutes:

Barnard College just released the transcript from Obama’s commencement address, in which he congratulates Barnard’s alumnae, encourages their ambitions, and basically spells out what he thinks of the all-female liberal arts college in terms of what has remained, judging from this truly epic Bwog flamewar, a contested question: whether or not Barnard is a legitimate component of Columbia University. The President of the United States of America:

Now, the year I graduated—this area looks familiar—(laughter)—the year I graduated was 1983, the first year women were admitted to Columbia.  (Applause.)  Sally Ride was the first American woman in space.  Music was all about Michael and the Moonwalk.  (Laughter.)

Over the weekend, The New York Times released some nifty graphics about the state of student debt in America. Although the numbers only go from 2004 to 2010, a couple things are pretty clear. For one, Ivy League tuition is going up pretty steadily, with no sign of slowing. Secondly, debt at graduation is fairly varied by Ivy institution, with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton at the low end, and Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Penn straddling high student debt levels (Columbia’s data wasn’t available). Click on to see some graphs detailing Ivy League tuition and debt. Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE: Cornell administrators have suspended Sigma Pi.

UPDATE: Sigma Pi releases statement [PDF].

On Sunday morning, someone standing on the roof of Cornell’s Sigma Pi fraternity (pictured) threw glass bottles at several black students while shouting the name of Trayvon Martin. Though the fraternity has been “fully cooperative” with law enforcement officers (according to the Cornell Police Department), two key details remain disputed: how many people were on the roof, shouting and throwing bottles; and whether any of them belong to Sig Pi.

Eyewitnesses told the Sun that they saw “a group” on the roof; but the fraternity claims that a single individual, who is not a brother, threw bottles at passerby.

Late Monday night, another story emerged on Cornell Hub, an anonymous forum populated by Cornell students, where a nameless poster wrote:

I actually know exactly who it was. Ready for this Cornell Hub? Sig Pi will claim otherwise but it was three guys who are all preppy spoiled and racist rich bitches.

The same poster then published the names and faces of three current Sig Pi brothers. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, a Crimson blogger wrote that Columbia has the worst athletics program in the Ivy League. Which is a bit like saying that Purdue has the worst comparative literature program in the Big Ten. (If it has one.)

Amazingly, a Spec blogger seems to have taken the jab completely seriously, and has written a crazy-insane bulleted list about how terrible Harvard is. A sampling:

2. Most racist law school students. “Today are are lots and lots of extra blacks on campus.”

3. Largest number of university presidents who have been forced to resign over sexist remarks. In 2006, Harvard president Lawrence Summers resigned his position after suggesting that there aren’t many women in the science and math fields because…uh, because women aren’t good at science and math. Whoops!

4. Longest amount of time a university community was willing to tolerate their sexist president. This category is like a breath-holding contest, except instead of timing how long people can go without breathing, we see who can ignore sexism the longest! Harvard wins! Summers made his controversial remarks in 2005, and stayed on as president for another year (and then got a paid, year-long sabbatical after that).

Yeah.  Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATED: The Sun uses QuarkXPress, and other revelations!

On Friday afternoon, “J.C.F.”—that would be Juan Forrer, the Cornell Sun’s “E.I.C.”—apologized for accidentally publishing profanity in Friday’s paper. The word, which Forrer declines to reveal, had been used to “identify” a professor. To add to the hilarity, Forrer claims the Sun was pranked vandalized:

The paper was vandalized Thursday night as The Sun celebrated its last night of publication for the semester. About 150 people gathered at our offices during this particular occasion. This is something that The Sun has been doing every year since I first joined.

[...]

The word is vulgar, and I can only issue the strongest condemnation of the person who put that word into the paper. Moving forward, we will be reconsidering whether we can host these sort of events at our office and taking steps to ensure that this type of error never happens again.

After choosing to disband following a particularly nasty scavenger hunt (oxymoron?), a tipster tells us Penn’s AEPi chapter will rise again, as APES. For those of you not in the know, APES is the common national off-campus version of closed AEPi chapters, seen here at Emory and George Washington. They’re not typically recognized by a university or the national fraternity organization. Basically, they’re the Sarah Palin of Greek life.

So why would this brotherhood dismantle itself and vacate their fraternity house by choice? Because it’s badass. As our tipster tells us:

Their fling tanks said “Rise of the Apes,” clearly acknowledging, and proud of, the fact that they were soon joining the “esteemed” ranks of off campus fraternities.

Off-campus “pseudo-Greek” iterations of former fraternities are common at Penn — Theos (The Old Sammy), OZ (Old ZBT), the Owl Society (Psi U’s logo) — and usually command a certain degree of “cool,” something our tipster tells us the former AEPi brothers hope to capitalize on. As a Daily Pennsylvanian columnist wrote the last time an off-campus society was established, “Those unofficial societies always throw the rowdiest parties anyway.” And who needs a national fraternity brotherhood when you have that?

Harvard instructor Mey Akashah was busted Friday trying to sneak marijuana into Bermuda for a weekend trip with her husband. Airport police were alerted by drug-sniffing dogs to 6 grams of pot wrapped up in a plastic bag in her underwear. Good to know this foolproof method made it past United States airport security. According to the Boston Herald, Akashah claimed that a doctor prescribed her the pot to treat nausea following a colon operation.

However, at a court hearing Monday, Akashah pleaded guilty to illegally transporting the pot into the country and failed to produce any documentation of her prescription, which Bermudian Senior Magistrate Archibald Warner candidly termed “strange.” Akashah said she knew the pot was illegal, but “responded illogically due to the amount of pain I was in.”

The judge declined to sentence Akashah, stating that a conviction would have an “overwhelming effect” on the fragile Harvardian.

Akashah received a doctoral degree from the Harvard School of Public Health last year and now holds a temporary position as an environmental health instructor at HSPH set to end May 31. According to The Crimson, a Harvard administrator declined to comment as to whether Akashah would receive any disciplinary action.