The IvyGate Index: Calibrating Hegemony Since 2006
The price of attending an Ivy League school is not the tuition -- it's the subsequent lifetime you spend encountering your classmates' bylines.
A brother can't even glance at a periodical without suffering flashbacks. Open the New York Times and boom, it's 30 years ago and Nick "One F" Kristof is hitting on your girl at a Crimson party. Grab The New Republic -- God, that dweeb Beinart would wake you up every morning at 7 a.m. braying show tunes down the hall in Pierson. Flip through the New Yorker and wow, there was that time you and Phil Gourevitch stayed up after that party in Risley, had a lot of wine, really just talked, and one thing led to another and it's not like it makes you gay, it was just college, you know? We digress. Ivy bylines -- they're everywhere! And they will haunt every minute of your media-soaked life.
It's no secret that Ivy Leaguers run the Fourth Estate. It's a given, a commonly acknowledged conceit ... that also happens to be completely, totally wrong. How do we know?
Meet our newest recurring feature: the IvyGate Index®, a highly scientific measure of Ivy influence in various industries. In each installment, our crack statisticians (poached in a clandestine midnight raid on the U.S. News & World Report compound) will pore over reams of data, using patented hegemony formulae to give you the numbers you crave with cutting-edge graphical representation. That's right, bitches: pie charts.
This week, we point the mighty IvyGate Index® telescope at the top rungs of the media ladder. Verdict: Shockingly little dominance!
In conclusion, the media industry's IGIQ (IvyGate Index Quotient) is 44 percent. After the jump, we've included a note on methodology for all you budding freakonomists. Next week: robber barons of the extraction industries.
A Note on Methodology: In the spirit of transparency, we present you with the raw data compiled by our Ivy-pedigreed social economists. The IGI considers the almae matres of the ranking editors of the country's top 10 daily papers, plus the 15 best magazines, arbitrarily chosen. After much gnashing of teeth, we dedided to count Ivy graduate programs but assign them less weight than undergraduate schools. For example, Mort Zuckerman received an M.B.A. from UPenn and a J.D. from Harvard Law; we counted his influence as one Ivy share -- half a share for each graduate degree.
Raw Data
| Publication | Top Editor | School | Ivy? |
| USA Today | Ken Paulson | Mizzou | no! |
| The Wall Street Journal | Paul Steiger | Yale | yes |
| The New York Times | Bill Keller | Pomona | no! |
| Los Angeles Times | Dean Baquet | Columbia (dropout) | yes |
| The Washington Post | Len Downie | Ohio State | no! |
| Chicago Tribune | Ann Marie Lipinski | Michigan | no! |
| New York Daily News | Mort Zuckerman | Penn, Harvard | yes |
| The Philadelphia Inquirer | Amanda Bennett | Harvard | yes |
| Denver Post/Rocky Mountain News | Greg Moore | Ohio Wesleyan | no! |
| Houston Chronicle | Jeff Cohen | Texas | no! |
| Glamour | Cynthia Leive | Swarthmore | no! |
| New Yorker | David Remnick | Princeton | yes |
| Time | Richard Stengel | Princeton | yes |
| Newsweek | Mark Whitaker | Harvard | yes |
| Esquire | David Granger | UT-Knoxville | no! |
| The New Republic | Franklin Foer | Columbia | yes |
| Weekly Standard | Bill Kristol | Harvard | yes |
| The National Review | Richard Lowry | UVA | no! |
| Atlantic Monthly | James Bennet | Yale | yes |
| Wired | Chris Anderson | GW, Berkeley | no! |
| Slate | Jacob Weisberg | Yale | yes |
| New York Magazine | Adam Moss | Oberlin | no! |
| Vogue | Anna Wintour | no college | no! |
| Vanity Fair | Graydon Carter | no college | no! |
| Sports Illustrated | Terry McDonell | Berkeley | no! |
Source: the Internet.
26 Comments | 
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August 29th, 2006 at 9:12 am
Industry Shocker: Half of the Mostly White Men in Top Media Slots Went to Crappy Schools Like UVA
Over at IvyGate, a deliberately non-scientific study reveals some stunning news: Top editors at top publications are not all…
August 29th, 2006 at 9:30 am
This time, IvyGate, you’ve gone too far. At best Dean Baquet is worth a fractional share, pro rated according to the number of credits he accrued before his untimely departure, based on a review of his DAR. Have YOU reviewed his DAR???
August 29th, 2006 at 9:49 am
So, people from 5 schools make up about half the execs in media, and people from the other 400+ colleges (except the three lame ivys) make up the other half. You’re right, that shows what little weight those Ivys pull.
August 29th, 2006 at 9:49 am
Ah yes, the market share graph loved by every single investment banker and consultant alive.
August 29th, 2006 at 9:55 am
Public Sector there are eight ivy league schools, not five: Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, Brown, UPENN, Dartmouth,Yale, Princeton.
August 29th, 2006 at 10:02 am
I just love that Anna and Graydon didn’t even go to college.
August 29th, 2006 at 10:59 am
forbes: bill baldwin, harvard
August 29th, 2006 at 11:21 am
Dear Anonymous:
You may want to read my entire statement, in which I mention the “three lame Ivies” (Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell) which feature no media execs — look at his graph, where the 44% are all made up of grads of five of the eight schools.
You probably went to Cornell or something.
August 29th, 2006 at 11:23 am
Katie Couric – UVa
Brian Williams – George Washington U
Charles Gibson – Princeton
August 29th, 2006 at 11:26 am
Unfortunately, this isn’t surprising. Having worked in media for over 14 years now, I can state that most of the top media slots are occupied by jerks and/or morons. And yes, most of them did NOT attend Ivy League (or prestigious) schools, and the ones that did were usually made fun of by their more-common brethren. Such is media (mediocre).
August 29th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
I finally understand why I can never get through an issue of Vanity Fair.
It’s edited by a maroon.
August 29th, 2006 at 12:50 pm
I was just about to say what Public Sector said quite well. In fact, better than I could have said it. Does anyone think this post made sense? Anyone?
August 29th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
Yeah, the very dumb Garance Franke-Ruta thinks it does.
August 29th, 2006 at 2:42 pm
If The Weekly Standard and National Review make the list, what about The Nation? Katrina vanden Heuvel — Princeton.
August 29th, 2006 at 4:44 pm
Jiblets: We Bet Lindsay Lohan’s Vag is Beautiful Like a Flower
• This Lindsay Lohan tribute is the most misogynistic, disgusting, bullshit we’ve ever heard. We actually couldn’t listen to the whole thing. Straight guys will probably think it’s funny though. [TMZ] • So, Julia Louis Dreyfus really deserve…
August 29th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
Peter Beinart was in Branford, not Pierson. At least name-check the right residential college. Holla!
August 29th, 2006 at 7:08 pm
let’s be real… us weekly. janice minn. columbia. talk about JOURNALISM. ;-)
August 29th, 2006 at 11:53 pm
she made the cover of columbia college today. an occasion to weep for alma mater.
September 6th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
You did not include some managzines which are actually more pretigious and scholarly than those on your list. The Nation (certainly more important than Glamour) is edited by David Corn (Brown 1981).
September 6th, 2006 at 1:57 pm
Perhaps a better measure of how important or influential Ivy grads are in the publishing, media, literature world would be to determine the amount of Pulitzer and similar prizes have been awarded to Ivy grads over the past five to ten years.
Also, Brian Williams never graduated from college, so I do not why he is listed as having attended GWU.
September 6th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
It is unfortunate that this blog (like many similar college/education blogs) get so focused on the ranking order within the Ivies– and the inevitable negative comments about one school or another. I note for the record that Dartmouth grad Paul Gigot is the very influential editor of the very influential Wall Street Journal, and Mort Kondracke is or has been editor of several important policial journals. I also note that Peter Kovacs (editor of the main New Orleans newspaper) and two of his fellow reporters all were awarded Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage of Katrina last year. But since they all went to that “lame Ivy” (Brown), they are not worthy of mention. Incentially, over the past five years Brown has produced more Pultizer prize winning writers, playwrights and reporters than probably any other Ivy. Too bad it is so lame. I guess Brown or Dartmouth grads cannot get the wonderful opportunities to work at such rags as New York Daily News or Glamour. I would be ashamed to have an Ivy degree and work for either of those publications.
September 6th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Bob: You have a gift for satire. You need to be writing for us.
September 29th, 2006 at 10:35 am
So, people from 5 schools make up about half the execs in media, and people from the other 400+ colleges (except the three lame ivys) make up the other half. You’re right, that shows what little weight those Ivys pull.
Posted by: Public Sector | August 29, 2006 09:49 AM
May 28th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
I think Ivy Gate has proven its anti-thesis. What percentage of college graduates went to Ivy League schools? Fewer than one percent. Okay, now you’re saying that forty percent of the management of major newspapers went to Ivy League schools? It seems to me Ivies are massively overrepresented by more than 4000 percent.
May 30th, 2007 at 3:54 am
So you make a passing reference in your introduction to Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch (Cornell 1986) but then go on to exclude him from your analysis? That’s rather lame.
[Did he indeed live in Risley? How appropriate...]
May 30th, 2007 at 5:43 pm
NYTimes has to be Columbia. Sulzberger went to Columbia, as did many editors…