It’s about that time of the year when your pants are fitting a little tighter and couples, making you snarl: Valentine’s pre-week, and if you’re lucky, Sex Week as well. Slushy snowy nonsense keeps you indoors, and your achy breaky heart’s asking you to look for love in all the wrong places. What options have you got? Facebook? Umm…Grandma’s on that, now. Craigslist? Not, unless you want to be brutally axe-murdered. How about their twisted, nymphomaniac grandchild: a new site, just for lonely collegiates like yourself?

Well, why not? Guess it’s about time for a techno-regime change; young, bored college students need to redefine what’s already been defined. Myspace failed where Facebook triumphed. And now, e-Harmony’s been bested by this new, perky young thing, fresh to the Interwebs. Her name’s GoodCrush, and she’s on the prowl, eating away the last three minutes you have after Facebook-ing, Twitter-ing, Digging, Myspace-ing, Masturba… – taking long showers etc.

If your inbox hasn’t already been thoroughly molested by GoodCrush’s prying hands, then sorry… guess you’re not attractive. (Or just not the Yale student body president.) Either way, the love notices are as sex-starved as…well, as all the Ivies themselves. Take these Shakespeareans, for example:

Your beauty is so radiant it’s like you have eight legs. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.

You were wearing an argyle sweater. You’re descended from Xerxes.

You’re short and Asian and always so well-dressed…I love that you use a pink ruler to draw your graphs when taking notes….any chance you’d want to hold my ruler and lie tangent to my production possibilities frontier?

Hot. If people weren’t so busy being awkward stalkers, who knows how many children would be running around on campuses? The smell of love’s in the air, and GoodCrush is cooking up a feral pheromone stew. Or maybe that’s just the smell of lube, SAE. Either Cupid’s shooting blanks or college kids have finally realized that mystery is sexy (do me, Sherlock).

So how does it work? Crush on anyone (literally) by typing their e-mail into a precarious “crush list.” They’ll get your anonymous note and – ta-da! More confusion. They sign-up and are forced to find you by “matching” your crush. Sound like a romantic disaster? Yup: In every way possible. But it’ll get you laid, right? This Valentine’s, don’t sit alone in your room with Mr. Vibes, a Fleshlight, or your best friend: Jergens. Get out there. GoodCrush…and then smash!

Or, maybe just get trashed. Love is overrated.

Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the most sexually healthy of all? Well, according to Trojan, which just released its annual Sexual Health Report Card, it’s not any of us debauched Ivy Leaguers. Its 2009 report, which ranks 141 colleges nationwide on such scintillating criteria as “the availability of sexual health resources and information,” yielded a few unpleasant surprises.

After surveys, polling, and health-center analysis, the (wait for it) South Carolina Gamecocks emerged victorious (Go Cocks!). The venerable Ivies—perhaps reaching ED age—did not fare as well in the sensuality department.

Sex-starved Columbia, who last year claimed the Ivy copulation-crown with a silver medal second place finish, fell to fourth, and orgy-planning Cornell, from third to eighth. Prostitutin’-Penn took a nosedive from 21st to 45th, condom-condemning Princeton dropped from 29th to 61st, and Lena-Chening Harvard (sexually healthy to say the least), from 25th to 62nd. Ouch…

This is pretty troubling, especially as Yale administrators publicly attempt to “strengthen the resolve of those who are dedicated to finding just the right words that would lead to glorious and consensual sex”(true story); glorious and consensual maybe, but unhealthy? We in the Ivy League have more sex than just about anybody outside California’s 27th District. Maybe those loser abstinence-only nerds were right… We’re headed for disaster! Time to jump the sex-ship Ivy Leaguers; save your junk while you still can!

But wait!: good news, and the full Trojan Sexual Health list–with criteria and 2008/2009 comparisons–after the jump.

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Great news for the guy in lecture who’s been blocking everyone else behind him with his eight popped collars–douche is in this season! The New York Observer recently declared Ivy League fashion the trend of this fall, beckoning in a new era of flagrant assholery.

Defining “trad” as an “Ivy League-inflected style that’s managed to retain an old-school sensibility without seeming dated or costumelike,” writer Joe Pompeo immediately goes on to contradict himself:

Think Oxford button-downs (and that’s real button-downs, meaning collars that button down, not simply dress shirts, to which the term is often misapplied). Natural-shouldered blazers. Flat-front khaki trousers. Loafers. Bow ties, rep ties. Polo shirts in solid colors. Lots of madras plaid. Early Brooks Brothers. New England WASPs. F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Does the sidekick monkey come with the outfit? Read more after the jump.

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U.S. News & World Report wrote about yet another ranking system on its blog, The Paper Trail. Unlike other rankings, the Global Language Monitor’s iteration eschews an arcane formula in favor of a more direct approach; it merely tallies up the the number of mentions a particular college or university gets in print and online, and orders schools accordingly.

Half of the top ten schools in the university category are from the Ivy League. As you’d expect, Harvard comes out on top. Columbia takes a surprising second, while Yale (8), Princeton (9), and Cornell (10), sit at the bottom of the top. The Ivies that no one’s ever heard of fare worse: Penn is 11th, Brown is 30th, and Dartmouth – surprise, surprise – is unlisted.

Obviously, the rankings are biased toward large research universities, which explains why undergrad-focused schools like Brown and Dartmouth would do poorly. But then again this version is only measuring quantity and not quality – it doesn’t profess to do anything else. It’s refreshingly direct in its methodology, so, at least in our minds, it’s a welcome addition to the dubious world of college rankings.

As we near the “big Money Bonfire of 2008,” a number of questions weigh heavily on the nation’s mind: Should the federal government receive shares in the banks and companies being bailed out? Is $700 billion enough? Can we have another day to think this over, Mr. Paulson? But most of all the nation has been wondering what will happen to current and prospective Ivy League bankers. This is where Ivygate comes in. Last week we ran a feature where worried bankers told you they were “trying to stay positive.” This week we bring you…um, more quotes from bankers.

George, an Ivy-educated pseudonymous banker working as an analyst at Merrill Lynch, describes how he found out about Bank of America’s buyout of Merrill:

I was shocked. I was screaming.

One of my friends at Bank of America texted me, ‘Hey, we might be buying you guys.’

I was in denial. You see, Merrill has a much better repuation than a commercial bank like Bank of America. I was shocked I would be joining a lower-tier commercial bank. There’s a feeling, ‘I didn’t go through this whole interview process to work at a commercial bank.’

Hopefully, Bank of America won’t change too much of Merrill’s culture.

Jeffrey, a pseudonymous Ivy grad working at JP Morgan, had this to say:

Lots of people will be jobless in the coming months.

I applied for jobs at Lehman. I could have been that guy with the Lehman job. It’s very frightening.

After the jump, George returns to tell us why $700 billion isn’t enough and why Goldman Sachs’s and Morgan Stanley’s decision to become “bank holding companies” is the end of i-banking as Ivy League cash bonanza. Read the rest of this entry »

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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