Now that we're officially in a recession and everyone's throwing around words like "death of the middle class," "what job market?" and "SPAM for every meal", perhaps you're having trouble keeping track of all the bad news. We're here to give you the rundown, Ivy-style. In this afternoon's installment of Recession Watch '08: Harvard is out $8 billion! Brown makes like Dartmouth and Cornell and imposes a hiring freeze! And Columbia looks to sell its private equity holdings (maybe)!
This morning, the New York Times reported that Harvard's endowment has lost $8 billion, or 22 percent of its value, in the last four months. In a letter to the deans, University President Drew Faust and Executive Vice President Edward C. Forst '82 said that the total loss in value will likely be closer to 30 percent by June, the end of the current fiscal year. Harvard's endowment is the largest in the country, and the $8 billion loss alone is larger than the endowment value of all but four other American universities (Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT). Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday the New York Times published an exposé, of sorts, bolstering the new trend of foregoing the Ivy League admissions for cheaper, ask-fewer-questions colleges overseas. Top schools in the U.K. and Canada offer world-class educations preloaded with neat things like conversations in foreign languages and cobblestone streets. Apparently, kids also get to skip the crappy American traditions of doing well on SATs and writing personal statements---not to mention getting cured of a nasty case of of a plagiarism.
To high school students considering six-figure debt versus five-figure debt, the move to Europe's gothic arches and prestigious-sounding names abroad makes buckets of sense. (Reference to the global economic crisis implied.) As the Ivies reaffirm their commitment to increasing financial aid and eliminating debt, however, applying abroad really just seems like an easy way into tweed-wearing university towns. Club meetings at pubs and potential for Old World extravagance run a close second to sounding "original" when telling high school classmates your postgrad plans.
So is the faux-Ivy, go-abroad-for-a-new-accent trend really all it's cracked up to be? It all depends whether higher education should be what the title implies or just a ticket to drinking pints scot-free at 18. The whole Ivy League thing really is getting a bit tired for everyone (The New Yorker included?), but why not do it for the right reasons? Ivy League educations have never been more expensive or exclusive as they are now weirdly accessible to Europhiles and free to those who read the YDN.
College and university presidents are well-compensated, and, perhaps, rightly so. Like the CEOs of large corporations, they are responsible, chiefly, for the maintaining and generating of income. So with a down year for endowments, and a budget-constrained future ahead, it's no surprise that several have opted to forgo raises or to return a portion of their salaries back to the schools they helm.
Do these donations suggest that that college presidents are overcompensated? Maybe - but maybe not. Except for the president of Suffolk University, who earns a whopping $2.8 million dollars a year for manning a school that no one outside Boston has ever heard of, presidential salaries are roughly equivalent to their for-profit counterparts. And they are much lower than the robber barons, i.e. the heads of investment banks, that are largely responsible for crippling our economy.
Dear Amy, et al.: instead of returning your tax-deductible chump change, how about keeping annual tuition raises at, or under, the rate of inflation?
The intrepid lads and lasses of Ithaca College — some sort of liberal arts dealie that coexists with the Ivy Most Likely To Have An Inferiority Complex And/Or Belong To A Sorority — have created a delightful little soap opera entitled IVY. Filmed on Cornell's campus, IVY "may or may not be based on actual Cornell students. ... Okay. Yeah, they're kind of based on actual Cornell students. Like pretty much." The resulting parody so inspired, so ingenious, so delightfully spot-on, why, it almost makes you wish you went to a safety school! But seriously: I nearly died choking on my Diet Coke Plus with Vitamins during the opening scene, featuring a back-to-school monologue from Sorostitute #1, Emily:
Sure, the acting can be a little awkward, and the camera work kind of makes me motion-sick, but in the context of college, social discomfort and a lingering scent of vomit only enhance the cinema vérité quality. Emily emerges as the Blair Waldorf of the bunch, the scheming princess with her pussywhipped pre-med boyfriend, Chris. But Chris is having a change of heart! He's thinking about dropping out of Orgo! Even worse— he might be falling for Natalie, the outcast studio art major with a nose pierce and Jenny Lewis bangs!
After the jump (and mostly because "Gossip Girl" isn't on this week, which leaves a big hole in the "painfully-soundtracked elitist melodrama" part of our hearts) more video and we knock off Daily Intel's Gossip Girl reality index.
Last week, the Princeton Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) put on a protest flashback by stripping down to their skivvies for their furry friends. An eager email came in from the President of PAWS just after the event:
Hey IvyGate,
This afternoon, the Princeton Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) made quite a show with a "human bbq" demonstration outside Frist...Four brave students stripped down to their underwear (in the windy cold!), covered themselves with fake blood, and lay on the grilles as meat...
Well that sounds familiar. In fact, it sounds practically identical to the PAWS event six months ago which wasn't too far off of the PAWS event a few months before that. Lack of innovation aside, the classic shock-and-awe approach to protest made popular by PETA has proven fairly effective at getting attention. (Dan Matthew's 2004 "Fur Out, Love In" protest in Harvard Square is a good example.) The approach really should still shock and awe, however.
If you're going to get naked, at least get naked. And try to get arrested for it, too. More pictures and the full email after the jump.
Now that we're officially in a recession and everyone's throwing around words like "death of the middle class," "what job market?" and "SPAM for every meal", perhaps you're having trouble keeping track of all the bad news. We're here to give you the rundown, Ivy-style. In this afternoon's installment of Recession Watch '08: Harvard is out $8 billion! Brown makes like Dartmouth and Cornell and imposes a hiring freeze! And Columbia looks to sell its private equity holdings (maybe)!
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Read more: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, economics, endowment, Harvard, money, Penn, Princeton, recession
By now we know Obama appointed Timothy Geithner (Dartmouth '83) Treasury Secretary and Larry Summers (MIT '75 and Harvard '82) head of the National Economic Council. In fact, David Brooks wrote a column in last Friday's New York Times about how "
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