To those insane enough to still want to date someone from Princeton, Yale, et al. after attending an Ivy, a new, more blatantly bourgeois dating service now caters specifically to those elitist desires. According to their mission statement, the Ivy Plus Society, also referred to as TIPS (we couldn't have come up with a more ironic acronym if we tried) aims at creating "a community of talented, dynamic individuals" with 75% of their members claiming single status. Most likely an attempt to encourage genetically customizing future purebred offspring, the new venture founded by Jennifer Wilde Anderson, Yale '01, that stole Harvard's final club/Princeton's eating club concept targets recent alumni from the Ivies as well as their "plus" counterparts, such as Duke and Berkeley. The seemingly arbitrary qualifications even reach across the pond, with the London School of Economics making the list. Taking a Sex and the City approach to elitism and the dating scene, Ivy Plus assures the hesitant with promises of "fabulous":

[W]e all need a few nights to set the roof on fire and fill-up [sic] a glass or three with a dash of chaos & adventure.

Read the New York Times response after the jump.

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Why would the New York Times bother to do a story on your slightly unhelpful yet quasi altruistic non-profit tech start-up? Because your name is Joshua Kushner, your brother Jared owns the New York Observer, and the word "scion" can be applied to you, that's why.

It seems aside from pimping themselves out to a shady Mexican billionaire and music mogul David Geffen the Times is buttering up the Kushners for a loan by writing a 1,300 word profile on little bro Joshua's new pet project UniThrive. Besides being all jazzed that they might get some sweet Kushner cash, there was a fail. The reporter didn't even check out the microfinance group Kiva.org and the Times was forced to run a correction yesterday. That's just odd given UniThrive co-founder Tanuj Parikh is the cousin of Kiva's president.

Details and why begging is the new working after the jump.

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In the Op-ed section of yesterday's Times, Mark Taylor - chair of Columbia's Religion Department - broke from the rank-and-file optimism of Ivy League academics on academia by asserting that "Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning." (For those who have been living under a rock for the past fifty years, in 2008, Forbes gave Detroit - a city saddled with crime and unemployment - the dubious distinction of being America's most miserable city).

We're guessing that this Benedict Arnold of a professor has tenure because his ideas, which include retrenching both doctoral-level education and academia as a whole, are unlikely to popular to many colleagues and administrators at Columbia, a place dredged in the virtues of a classical education. (Columbia College, as one example, continues to yoke its students to a stringent core curriculum).

The problem, Taylor explains, stretches back to Kant, who wrote in the late 18th century that to "handle the entire content of learning" professors should teach different subjects. This, he argues,

has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

More after the jump.

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The ruinous state of our economy has done little to deter this year's batch of Ivy aspirants; for the class of 2013, acceptances rates fell at six of the eight Ivy League schools.

Harvard and Yale solidified their positions as the toughest schools to get into, at 7% and 7.5%, respectively, though the school formerly known as the College of New Jersey - while maintaining its third place position - slid, much to the dismay of some prestige-hungry Princetonians,  precipitously close to its proletarian New York City peer.

If we had to hazard a guess, we'd say the general rise in applications to the Ivy League may be owed in part to its constituents' sizable endowments and commitment to need-blind financial aid; in marked contrast, several other selective colleges and universities - including Colby and Oberlin - are, according to the New York Times, looking more favorably on wealthier applicants as they make admissions decisions this year."

Perhaps the decrease in selectivity at both Princeton and Penn is due to the fact that they are,  or rather have been, traditional feeders into Wall Street - a Wall Street that is no longer as glamorous as it was a few years before. If that yawn-inducing class on financial derivatives or corporate valuation isn't going to net you that super sweet 100-hour a week gig at Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns you might as well learn hot boxing 101 and take creative writing classes pass/fail at Brown.

Last week the Nixon Library released over 198 hours of Richard Nixon's rantings - recorded after his re-election in 1972 - and Gothamist pulled a few interesting quotes on the disgraced president's disdain for, well, pretty much everything, which includes the Ivy League.

Speaking with Henry Kissinger about the National Security Adviser's meeting with Ivy League college presidents about the war in Vietnam, Nixon had this to say:

The Ivy League presidents? Why I'll never let those sons of bitches in the White House again. Never, never, never. They're finished. The Ivy League schools are finished... Henry, I would never have had them in. Don't do that again... They came out against us when it was tough... Don't ever go to an Ivy League school again, ever. Never, never, never."

Of course Nixon's talking in the context of White House advice-seeking, but the begrudging quality of his words seems to imply that he didn't like the Ivy League in any context. A partial explanation for this may be found in the fact that while he was accepted to Harvard College on scholarship, transportation and living expenses made him choose nearby Whittier College instead. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday the New York Times published an exposé, of sorts, bolstering the new trend of foregoing the Ivy League admissions for cheaper, ask-fewer-questions colleges overseas. Top schools in the U.K. and Canada offer world-class educations preloaded with neat things like conversations in foreign languages and cobblestone streets. Apparently, kids also get to skip the crappy American traditions of doing well on SATs and writing personal statements---not to mention getting cured of a nasty case of of a plagiarism.

To high school students considering six-figure debt versus five-figure debt, the move to Europe's gothic arches and prestigious-sounding names abroad makes buckets of sense. (Reference to the global economic crisis implied.) As the Ivies reaffirm their commitment to increasing financial aid and eliminating debt, however, applying abroad really just seems like an easy way into tweed-wearing university towns. Club meetings at pubs and potential for Old World extravagance run a close second to sounding "original" when telling high school classmates your postgrad plans.

So is the faux-Ivy, go-abroad-for-a-new-accent trend really all it's cracked up to be? It all depends whether higher education should be what the title implies or just a ticket to drinking pints scot-free at 18. The whole Ivy League thing really is getting a bit tired for everyone (The New Yorker included?), but why not do it for the right reasons? Ivy League educations have never been more expensive or exclusive as they are now weirdly accessible to Europhiles and free to those who read the YDN.

Outsourcing is here, it's growing, and it kind of sucks. First it was limited to low level work: call centers and their ilk; things American college grads weren't competing for. But now, more and more, outsourcing is rapidly encroaching on jobs that have historically gone to Ivy League students: analyst positions at New York investment banks.

According to a recently published article in the Times, Wall Street's woes have fueled a bona fide bonanza of work in cheaper locales like India and Eastern Europe, where the research tasks that were once handed to newly-minted college grads and M.B.A.'s for salaries in excess of six-figures can be had for a fraction of the cost.

At India-based Copal Partners, which "churns out equity, fixed income and trading research for big name analysts and banks... business is up about 40 percent this year alone." Similar upturns in work have been seen by other third-party firms as well.

It doesn't seem like outsourcing will stop just there:

After research, the next wave may include more sophisticated jobs like the creation of derivative products, quantitative trading models and even sales jobs from the trading floors... In the future, executives in India like to joke, the only function for highly paid bankers in New York or London will be to greet clients and shake hands when the deals close.

More sobering quotes for all you finance types after the jump.

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After working hard, graduating from an Ivy League school and rising to a successful law career, a girl deserves her own Kevin Federline, right? Not if he's from a "different cultural and socio-economic background," says a concerned parent in last Sunday's "Social Q's," an advice column in the New York Times "Fashion and Style" section.

The parent writes,

My daughter, a much-loved, brilliant, Ivy-educated, well-reared lawyer, surprised my husband and me with her new boyfriend. He’s unemployed, socially inept and from an entirely different cultural and socio-economic background. He has moved into her town house, and to see our daughter we must also spend time with him. Am I duty-bound to be more polite to him than I would be toward any other gigolo?

Columnist Philip Galanes goes through the motions of a response and tells the advice-seeker to wait it out because these type of romances don't work out anyways. Read the response in its entirety after the jump.

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Last Sunday's New York Times Magazine featured an interview with Columbia religion professor, Dalai Lama friend, and famous person spawner Robert Thurman. Thurman, who was the first American ordained as a Tibetan monk (and a Harvard man himself), is on university leave this year but normally teaches classes on Buddhism.

At first, the interview seems to be standard fare -- thank you, New York Times, for hard-hitting journalism along the lines of:

As a Buddhist, how do you reconcile your pacifism with the roles your daughter Uma has played in films like Quentin Tarantino’s bloody “Kill Bill”?

But then something really fascinating and bizarre emerges. Follow the jump for an image that will sear itself into your brain.

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We did a mini-post yesterday on the NYT article "Students of Virginity" featuring Harvard's True Love Revolution, Lena Chen stuffing her face with ginger cake, and our own esteemed IvyGate commenters. Today we considered writing a lengthier post deconstructing the article blow-by-(not that kind of)-blow, but then we thought, why rush this? If we've learned one thing from TLR it's the value of "taking it slow." So instead we will deal with this in painstakingly small increments, gradually, pleasurably, one baby-sized scrap of hilarity at a time. Now presenting hilarious scrap #1: TLR co-president Leo Keliher ('09) in one of the more glorious photo/caption combos of our time:
 

Is that even a dorm room, or did he import a 12C monastery to sleep in? Leo's 15 minutes of rather embarassing fame after the jump.

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