Six years ago Princeton started deflating grades because professors were giving out too many As. (And it wasn’t just because Princeton kids are so much smarter than those at other schools!) Profs were told that only 35 percent of grades (down from about 50 percent in 2004) were supposed to be A-plus, A or A-minus. The 3.46 mean GPA of the Princeton class of 2003 dropped to a 3.39 in the 2009 class.

Princeton senior Daniel E. Rauch told The New York Times about his major trepidation:

The nightmare scenario, if you will, is that you apply with a 3.5 from Princeton and someone just as smart as you applies with a 3.8 from Yale.

(Applies where? We’re guessing Goldman Sachs.) An undergrad survey confirmed this sentiment establishing that 32 percent of students felt the grading policy was a top source of unhappiness.

But if Princeton really wanted to do a disservice to their students, they could have gone the Cornell route and started indicating class median grade averages on transcripts. So when you get a C-minus in ‘Human Sexuality,’ employers will not only know you’re bad in bed, but also that you’re flat out dense, since the median of everyone else taking the class was a B.

Instead, Princeton took a higher road and tried to calm doubts by doing some follow up research. They “studied the effects on admissions rates to top medical schools and law schools, and found none.” The administration also took some precautionary action by sending every transcript with a statement about the policy.

However, the students aren’t grasping the hard facts. The panic trickled up to The Daily Princetonian and in December the editorial board firmly stopped supporting the policy, citing fears that “the policy is hurting the prospects of Princetonians in both the job market and graduate school admissions.”

Yet that concern has already been squashed by the administration. So the clear inference to draw from this issue: today’s Princetonians are actually just dumber than ones of the past. The proof is in the GPAs.

Tonight, the audience of a free student showing of Watchmen in Cambridge erupted in applause at a line that Nixon actually sort of did deliver:

“Let’s see those bastards at Harvard figure a way out of that one.”

Oh crap, it’s coming true. The movie is f’ing long, almost an hour per upcoming year of recession according to one Harvard drop-out. At least this country’s last depression was also Prohibition, and anyone with gumption could run rum for money.

What are recent graduates supposed to do now? There are absolutely no jobs, and don’t even think about grad school. Finance positions, Ivy gravy until painfully recently, are down more than 70 percent. Which is poetic justice: the hotshot genius “quants” were playing Jenga with the world economy, and they were drunk. And yet, who is supposed to save us? Harvard’s Larry Summers and Dartmouth’s Tim Geithner (among others). Maybe that explains why Geithner’s own government is pulling the rug out from under him. That, or they know the truth.

The Watchman reference makes more sense after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

So you’re a few hundred grand in debt and fresh-faced in the big city — or, if you’re a Columbia grad, just happy to get out of Morningside Heights — with a B.A. in Comp Lit and, I don’t know, hopes and dreams. Even if your semesters reading Baudrillard don’t have any practical application, you figure that your degree must at least carry some weight, right? Right?

Erroneous, my friends.

Doree Shafrir’s Observer article, “Ivy League Slaves of New York,” is pretty self-explanatory by its subtitle: “America’s best and brightest are unpacking their gilded diplomas and getting to work as assistants in New York’s media dens, pinching themselves at their good fortune. Suckers!”

It appears that many graduates are coming to New York with visions of a swift ascent in a shiny media universe, but are quickly shot down. In fact, a certain brand of diploma might actually work against you:

Ms. Marcus explained that her former place of employment had a policy about not hiring anyone who had gone to an Ivy League school, because ‘they didn’t want people whom they could perceive as a threat.’ (The evidence bears this out somewhat: Ivy League grads do seem partial to cashing in via book deals; Lauren Weisberger, the author of The Devil Wears Prada, graduated from Cornell, and [Bridie] Clark is a Harvard alumna…)”

Well, if your Ivy League credentials are holding you back, you know our favorite fallback option: nepotism! Kidding(ish). Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE: YouTube has removed the video; we’ve replaced it with a Veoh clip below, or you can download the file here.
UPDATE 2: Turns out that serving up the enormous video file blew the roof off our server. We’ll let Veoh host for now, and re-host it if they take it down.
Aleksey Vayner is having a bad day. Imagine you’re a recruiting director at an investment bank. Aleksay’s resume come across your desk. The ‘07 Yalie’s stuff seems normal enough, until the link to a video at the end. Twenty-four hours later, you’re the laughingstock of New York, the newest viral sensation. We’ve been forwarded his stuff a couple times, and the email suffixes tell the whole story: Greenwich Capital Markets, Credit Suisse, Wachovia Securities, JP Morgan, Lazard, on and on and on.

Subject: FW: one more resume, u must see video
Subject: FW: this is pure gold.
Subject: True story- On line resume of a candidate for our training prog ram
“Too funny not to share” … “This guy must be the pride of Yale” … “You can’t make this sh** up” … “Don’t you guys go trying to recruit him – I’ve added myself to cs’s yale recruiting team. He’s ours” …

Here’s a link to Vayner’s official site (what’s with the weird must-be-over-18 warning?), and his original cover letter and resume. [Ed. note: We rushed this online as soon as we got it, only to notice Dealbreaker.com had it a little while ago. The headline overlap was accidental, seriously.) UPDATE: Read more of IvyGate’s wall-to-wall coverage of Aleksey Vayner!