The following episode of the IvyGate Index® has been rated WTF for strong language and a graphic depiction of a complete lack of Ivy dominance.

Welcome to the third (and probably final) installment of the IvyGate Index®, our hyperscientific gauge of Ivy influence in arbitrarily chosen fields. This time: Hollywood! Are you ready for your close-up?

To measure Ivy dominance of the film industry, we sicced our in-house team of Nobel number crunchers on the 78th Annual Academy Awards. We knew it was a gamble: Hollywood is not the Ivy slumber party that, for example, the media and the executive branch are. But how bad could it be? Movies are important … and nothing’s more important than the Ivies … so we should totally own these jokers, right?

Not so much. For the top 12 Oscar categories, a grand total of one (1) bona fide Ivy League diploma walked trophy-ward across the Kodak Theatre stage.

Why, it’s … it’s almost as if an Ivy diploma is overvalued in this context! Sean Penn, auto mechanics major at Santa Monica College? Say it ain’t so! We cry a single tear as we inform you that Hollywood’s IGIQ (IvyGate Index Quotient) is a box office bust at exactly 12 percent domination. Slap me Pappy, it’s pie chart time:

Verdict: What have you won for us lately, Natalie Portman?

Soldier on past the jump, if you’re able, for notes on methodology; disinfect all surfaces after handling raw data.

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When George W. Rootin’-Tootin’ Bush was elected in 2000, Ivy Leaguers got a little nervous. Would this folksy Texan smoke all the elites out of the executive branch?

Then we breathed a big, brandy-perfumed sigh of relief. The U.S. government can’t function without elitism! First there’s the pecking order of offices: Bush beats Rumsfeld beats Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne. Then there’s seniority: Rumsfeld and Cheney were helping run the country back when Bush was still doing lines off Andover china. Even though W.’s Yale and Harvard roots were kept on the hush-hush, we knew: Ivy League snobbery just might have a chance in this administration!

And so, almost six years into Bush’s tenure, we bring you the second installment of the IvyGate Index, measuring Ivy influence in our government’s executive branch. Our crackerjack statisticians have once again inhaled reams of data, using patented hegemony formulae to produce another set of cutting-edge visual representations. Duck down, clown: the pie charts are back.

Verdict: Mild dominance!

To be precise, the executive branch’s IvyGate Index Quotient (IGIQ) is 52.9 percent. Color us shocked, shocked — we had no idea our plainspoken president was such an elitist at heart! After the jump, we’ve included the raw data for your statmongering perusal.

EARLIER: The IvyGate Index: Calibrating Hegemony Since 2006 (the media)

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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.

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