Overachieving high school seniors affected by Hurricane Sandy need not fret, as all eight Ivy League admissions offices announced extensions to their early deadlines (originally November 1). So now, instead of worrying about the perfect ending to your personal essay, please go find shelter and clean water.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the new and improved early admissions deadlines:

• Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Yale will accept applications until November 5.
• Penn will accept applications until November 6.
• Brown will accept applications until November 7.
• Harvard and Princeton will accept late applications without deadline, provided there is a legitimate explanation included.

As the brain-child of a disenchanted Yalie named William F. Buckley, Jr., the National Review has never had an easy relationship with the eight schools from which it draws much of its writing talent, like Nathan Harden (who recently published “Sex and God and Yale”), Eve Tushnet (the gregarious Catholic writer), Maggie Gallagher (the gay marriage conspiracy theorist), and of course Buckley himself. Add to that managing editor Fred Schwarz (a Columbia grad), who articulates “the true, the fundamental conflict in Obama’s soul”:

Is he a Columbia asshole or a Harvard asshole? The answer is important, because those are two very different types of asshole. Both are obsessed with showing you how smart they are, but the Columbia asshole does it by telling you everything he knows, while the Harvard asshole does it by acting bored with whatever you say. The Harvard variety is at least laid back, and the Columbia variety can be interesting; but put them together and you have a world-weary pest. That may not be an exact description of Obama, but he’s certainly getting there.

The salty language surprised us—even us!—because, in his discussion of a recent Pundits prank at Yale (involving a character called “Wilma Dickfit”), IvyGate hero Nathan Harden confers NR the distinction of being “family-friendly” (really):

You won’t believe what they’re up to in New Haven. The latest example of a Yale’s depravity is so graphic that I can’t even mention much of it on these family-friendly pages. It involves an innuendo-filled flyer that appeared all over campus this week, advertising a fake event by a female author of a sex-themed book supposedly entitled “Let’s Find Out The Hard Way.” Crude, and woman-demeaning, this is comic material worthy of a 13-year-old’s intelligence and sophistication.

(Contra Harden, we think the National Review’s audience will believe.) Back to Schwarz: Read the rest of this entry »

Stuyvesant High School in New York City is known for being one of the top public schools in the county, but lately has been receiving some not so hot press for a cheating scandal that was uncovered last month. As the New York Times reports, the school found that a Stuyvesant student was taking cell phone pictures of tests and sending them, along with answers, to other students as the test was going on. So why did these high schoolers break the rules? To join the Ivy League.

Recent Stuyvesant grad Benjamin Koatz tells the Times that “when a couple of points can make the difference in getting into an Ivy League school, ‘then there is an incentive there.’”

Many students, Koatz says, come from families that tell their kids: ‘Ivy League school or bust.” In his words, at Stuyvesant, “you either go to an Ivy League school or you haven’t lived up to your potential.”

Just don’t tell that to the “more than 80 students” who applied to M.I.T., the damn underachievers.

Not Koatz though. He lived up to his potential. He’s going to Brown.

Today, the Q&A website Quora featured this question in its weekly email digest (yeah, yeah…): “How does one prepare enough to get a perfect score on the SAT?”

The most popular answer isn’t what you think it is. In a long reply (which includes a chart), Kai Peter Chang, who seems to be a TED employee a TEDx San Francisco marketing director, reveals how he gamed the SAT’s reporting procedure in order to present the highest possible score in his college applications:

How to Cheat the SATs

I understood at age 15 that a single, solitary high SAT score was far more impressive than multiple attempts at it.

At the time (this may have changed), the ETS tracked your SAT-taking history through your Social Security Number. With this in mind, every time I took the SATs between Sophomore and Junior year, I deliberately wrote my SSN off by one digit.

When I finally got the score I wanted (1510 in my case), I called up ETS and raised hell, telling them they screwed up my SSN and demanding that they correct it to my true SSN.

“Oh, we are so sorry Mr. Chang. We will fix that for you immediately. Please accept our apologies …”

Consequently, only one high score was attached to my true SSN, and it became the basis for my applications.

That is amazing. Read the rest of this entry »

Three weeks ago, we suggested that Occupy Princeton should drop out of Princeton. Because it’s a little silly to protest Wall Street—or the present economic order, or income inequality, and so on—if you attend a school which both perpetuates all of those things and benefits from them. A school which, arguably, is less a university than a finishing school for bankers. (And which employs Jeffrey Eugenides and Joyce Carol Oates for the same reason Goldman Sachs installed a Franz Ackerman mural in the lobby of its New York headquarters.)

Here’s how one commenter answered:

No. That would be dumb. That’s like saying “If you don’t want Romney for president you should totally just leave the country if he’s elected.”

It’s like retreating. Giving up! White-flagging! Total pussy move.

It’s totally OK for people to criticize something they’re part of if they’re asking it to change for the better and they themselves are working to be better.   Read the rest of this entry »

The numbers that are the dick-measuring contest known as Ivy League admissions are finally in, and IvyGate could think of no better way (we didn’t try that hard) to gauge the different school’s reactions by taking to the streets to interview students and determine their (hilarious) reactions to the statistics.

Brown University rolls in (alternatively, “wraps up”) with an admission percentage of 9.6%, a .6% increase from last year! When asked about this rise, I was met with stony eyes and this response: “Brown recently discovered that admitting more students meant more money from tuition. The following year admissions rose higher than for any other Ivy League institution. Where do you think we got the money for our new pool?”

Columbia coasted into a .5% increase from 6.9% last year, on which a student commented,

I’ve never looked at Columbia’s admissions the way others look at it. Others look to decrease the number to appear better. Columbia has always let in more than they can, because we’re not looking to falsify our admissions statistics, though they will automatically be low, as it is an Ivy League school.

Yeah…you can only expect so much from a school in baby blue.  Read the rest of this entry »

So it seems universities have been looking at the problem backward. The issue isn’t that so many of their well-educated students want to go to Wall Street rather than make another sort of contribution. It’s that so many of their students end up feeling so poorly prepared that they go to Wall Street because they’re not sure what other contribution they can make.

Oh Lord.

The idea is that once you pass the test at Goldman, you can do anything. You learn Excel, you learn valuation, you learn how to survive intense hours and a high-pressure environment. So it seems like a good way to launch your career. That’s very appealing for those of us at Harvard who were not in pre-professional majors.

Right: Excel. That’s the appeal of Goldman Sachs. It’s practically a charity! Wall Street: also good for learning PowerPoint and Outlook.

The Ivy League sex column is a lot like the Ivy League in general: an opportunity to brag about oneself and boss others around. Take Cornell’s newest columnist—a sex columnist—who now writes a Daily Sun column about having sex in middle school, high school, and college, with an inscrutable potpourri of late-90’s lingo and Puritan euphemism:

The choreography was becoming natural: This hand here, that hand there, this happens now, this feels good for me, that feels good for him, fun, fun, tra la la, aaaaand finish! Easy. Familiar. Repeat.

Later:

So that was it. I did lesbian sex! And while I am by no means an expert, I am proud of the progress I have made. I’ll leave the strap-on saga for a later date, as I am not sure that many other experimenters will venture that far.

Haha! Strap-on. She said strap-on! Guys, look. Strap-on. Meanwhile, at the the newly Sex Week-less Yale, Maria Yagoda (pictured) insists that all men are really bad at sex, so there.  Read the rest of this entry »

Harvard and Princeton tied for the top spot in this year’s list. See how all the other Ivies fared after the jump.

Sweet relief, they’ve finally come! At midnight tonight, the U.S. News & World Report released the 2012 edition of its signature product. And all was right in the world once more.

Oh, how far we’ve come since this same wondeful time last fall. What a long road it’s been. All those days and months of barely contained excitement and eager anticipation; of clenched fists, white knuckles, fingernails chewed to the bone; of anxiety mounting to a slow, then rapid, boil; and everywhere you looked, you saw reminders of your once orderly life — your formerly promising future and once-torrid passions, both now as cold and barren as a winter-savaged Hanover. And these things, these relics, they remind you of a moment in time when words still mattered, when the world still made sense, when there was an arbiter to make plain what otherwise might have been left unspoken, unscored.

From the darkest of nights marched that staid and true, benevolent newsweekly, to restore by its awesome decree the order our lives have been lacking — so that once more, we might joyously call out to all of our friends and family members, “My college is better than your college.”

All of which is really to say: Questionable methodology and arbitrary adjudications aside, we get it. Rankings have an allure that’s hard to resist. But let’s not get crazy about it or anything.

Read the rest of this entry »

Football in the Ivy League hasn’t been good since penicillin was discovered. But each year, against all odds, a handful of alumni from our esteemed, testosterone-deficient sports conference manage to sneak their way into the NFL.

2011 is no different, and six Ivy grads will be lacing up their cleats, donning their helmets and doing their best not to batter their boy-genius brains into oblivion this fall. Those players are:

• Brown’s Zak DeOssie (linebacker, Giants)
• Cornell’s Kevin Boothe (guard, Giants)
• Cornell’s Bryan Walters (wide receiver, Chargers)
• Harvard’s Matt Birk (center, Ravens)
• Harvard’s Desmond Bryant (defensive tackle, Raiders)
• Harvard’s Ryan Fitzpatrick (quarterback, Bills) [pictured right]

Brown’s David Howard, defensive tackle, was the lone Ivy Leaguer picked in this year’s draft, by the Tennessee Titans. He was later signed the Seattle Seahawks, and played in the team’s final pre-season game. Unfortunately, he was released late last week.

Read the rest of this entry »