Everyone is getting into the college rankings game these days, and everyone - it seems - has the same goal in mind: to dethrone the juggernaut that is the U.S. News & World Report. But while students and alums of certain liberal arts colleges and lesser-known universities are probably reveling in Forbes.com’s inaugural rankings, the newest kid on the block is unlikely to find much support among the non-Princeton Ivy set this year.

Of the 569 schools included in the rankings, here’s how the Ivies stacked up:

1. Princeton
3. Harvard
9. Yale
10. Columbia
27. Brown
61. Penn
121: Cornell
127: Dartmouth

Brown at 27 already seems like a stretch, but Penn at 61, Cornell at 121, and Dartmouth at 127? How vulgar, indecent, cruel! Some quotes and commentary after the jump.

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“What’s squash?” someone once asked over brunch at my eating club. “It’s like tennis, but richer and whiter,” someone else replied. Yeah, that’s pretty much it. But I would add the detail, “people named Khan.”

An article in the New York Times, part of its obsessive catering to the anxiety-wracked parents of the almost college-aged, reveals squash to be not the abstract pursuit of extracurricular excellence we all thought it was, but rather something more worldly. The Times explains:

Squash, an indoor racket sport long associated with private clubs and old-boy networks, is so esoteric that it barely qualifies as a back door. In terms of the number of actual spots on college rosters, it might be more of a pet door.

Squash tends to be played by people who live in places like Greenwich, Conn., and not — to use an exquisitely Times-y euphemism — “young people from the inner city.” In other words, the cultivation of a relatively esoteric sport like squash becomes a way the affluent can leverage their affluence into improving their child’s shot at getting into an Ivy.

This is because squash, while a definite “pro” on an admissions app, requires things only available to a certain minority — leisure time, equipment and access to courts, club membership or boarding school attendance, or even a certain degree of cultural capital.

As one parent puts it:

Parents, Mr. Sher said, like the idea “that not everybody can play it, not everyone can afford it - it’s almost like it’s a more upscale product.”

So what is squash? Is it a quasi-nefarious way for “rich, white people” to circumvent the otherwise meritocratic standards of modern college admissions, or just an esteemed niche sport caught up in the craziness and ruthless market pressures of same modern college admissions?

Sam Jackson, didn’t you go to Exeter? Weigh in on this.

After the jump — the article in full, nothing actually, because the Times has informed us that posting the article was a violation of copyright.

No, actually that headline is totally false. It belongs to the more interesting article the WSJ should have written. But in any case Collegiate does have the highest percentage of students who enroll in either “Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins” in case that motley group means anything to you.

In this article, which is clearly aimed at soliciting the self-satisfied clucks of its affluent readership, the WSJ employs what is possibly the most dubious methodology of all time in order to produce a fancy ranking of high-schools. See if this exercise makes any sense to you:

Weekend Journal looked at the freshman classes at eight top colleges — Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins — and compiled a list of the students’ high-school alma maters. The survey ranked the high schools based on the number of students sent to those eight colleges, divided by the high school’s number of graduates in 2007, limiting the scope to schools that had senior classes of at least 50. The “success rate” column represents the percentage of students in each high-school’s graduating class that attended one of our chosen colleges.

Pomona, seriously? In any case, all of the usual suspects put in an appearance, NYC private schools (Collegiate, Trinity, Chapin, Brearley), New England boarding schools (Andover, Exeter, Groton, Deerfield), the famous magnet schools (TJ, that school in Illinois that’s like TJ) , and the schools that make local sense (Princeton High School) But there are also some schools nobody saw coming, like Daewoo Foreign Language High School, located in Seoul.

After the jump — the chart of schools, with juicy glosses like, “The school, founded in 1635, sent 25 kids to Harvard–more than any other high school on our list,” and “Many students at the Jewish day school spend a year in Israel before college, which the school says may affect its numbers in our survey.”

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Despite the fact that we spend hours and hours obsessively scanning obscure publications like Inside Higher Education and painfully low-quality dailies like The Daily Princetonian for any mention of the Ivy League which could supply us with a post, no matter how tenuous or irrelevant (thanks, Chris and Nick — you guys are the best), somehow we missed this incredible article which ran in the WSJ about a month ago.

The WSJ dispatched their spirits critic (yes, the WSJ has a spirits critic) to write a column on drinks named after schools from the Ivy League. The result is a cool, complex mix of colorful reportage and incisive comment that goes down easy yet leaves one shaken. The author begins with a story surely familiar in one form or another to many denizens of the LES:

The bartender knew the times were changing when some Ivy League toffs wandered in: “You’ll think I’m kidding,” the saloon-keeper told Delaplane, “but I got an order couple nights for a Yale Cocktail!”

Yale wasn’t the only Ivy with a cocktail to its name. Depending on the Bartender’s Guide the saloon-keeper bought, he likely would also have found cocktail recipes immortalizing Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia and Brown (Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania seem to have missed out when the collegiate cocktails were being named). Sadly, these drinks have been all but forgotten, and in the rare instance where one persists — the Yale — the cocktail has become a parody of its former self.”

Imagine that: Yale a parody of itself. The problem with the Yale Cocktail, opines the author in vaguely racist undertones, is that its once signature constituent, Crème Yvette, an exotic, expensive European liqueur “flavored with violet petals, vanilla, and spices,” has been replaced by blue curacao. The Yale Cocktail has lost its “subtle taste and elegant dignity (a status impossible for any drink that relies on blue curaçao).” Yeah, we know what you really mean.

The author writes of the Harvard Cocktail, “It is as delicious as it is aristocratic,” and he calls the Princeton Cocktail,”one of the most appalling concoctions ever devised.” Cornell gets mentioned a couple times in parentheses.

After the jump — the full article.

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According to statistics I just made up, but which are probably true, almost %65 of Ivy League graduates go on to work in the financial services industry. At many Ivies September and October degenerate into grim rituals of greed and acquisition on behalf of both students and recruiters. Here are some unintenionally hilarious recruiting materials I found on the floor in Princeton’s library.

After the jump — “12:00 p.m. Lunch with a referral at her private club. She’s wearing a velvet headband and pearls. I gear myself up for a very polite tutorial.”

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I’m not writing about Harry Potter just because it’s a national obsession: there are some very clear Ivy ties. For example, the Daily Princetonian reported back in January that Daniel Radcliffe was going to be Princeton ‘11. Wait, that was the joke issue? Honestly, I have a very straightforward motivation in promoting Harry Potter–it fosters in children an interest in witchcraft and the occult, and with that in mind, it helps me in my Hell-borne quest to subvert Christian morality and destroy the fabric of American society. Duh.

No, the real connection comes from the way students all over have a tendency to associate the ‘magic of Hogwarts’ with their own schools.

Yale has a particular obsession: when not complaining about Hermione being too attractive, the Yale Daily News passes the time debating which residential colleges are most like Gryffindor and whether Larry Summers is Voldemort incarnate. On Facebook, the story is no different. Yale has spawned “Yale is Hogwarts, Harvard is Azkaban,” and “I Chose Yale Because it is Like Hogwarts” –265 and 448 members at writing, respectively.

Harvard’s response? “Harvard is Hogwarts, Yale is Azkaban”… 4 members. Back in 2001 the Crimson observed that quite a few Harvard students found HP “very harvardish,” or that Hogwarts was “Harvard plus magic.” “The childish nature of the Harry Potter series appears to be a strong pull,” wrote G.M. Sheehan. The debate is since settled; Scholastic’s first reader (Arthur Levine, Brown ‘84) in charge of Harry Potter noted at a Master’s Tea that Yale was “the closest thing you can get to Hogwarts in the United States.” At least Harry and the Potters are playing in Harvard Hogwarts Square on opening night.

But don’t fight about which school is Hogwarts–don’t you see? No one school is, they all are! It’s magic.

Send tips, but not spoilers, to ivygate.guest@gmail.com. Fun campus Harry Potter stories are welcome!

–SAM JACKSON

In our continuing coverage of the Class of 2011’s alcohol-fueled escapades - (don’t worry Antonio; you’re in good company), we bring you an entire genre of weirdness: the 2011 facebook party groups.

Across the Ivy League, these remarkably similar groups of self-proclaimed alcoholics are proliferating. They feature a whole lot of back-and-forth about what kinds of parties to throw, what kind of drinks are totally bomb, and how to obtain fake ID’s - or, as Penn kids prefer to call them, “counterfeit documents.”

Many of these children seem like douchebags; others are just clueless. But watching them interact is utterly fascinating. They are learning, people. And that’s what college is all about. Though we do wish they’d take some time out of Drinking 101 and learn to spell.

After the jump: Why the Class of 2011 is the Best Class Yet

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