Lost in the hullabaloo over the recent Vanity Fair profile on Sarah Palin and her subsequent, if unrelated, resignation was the magazine's article "Rich Harvard, Poor Harvard" by Nina Munk. The spread chronicles the massive expansion of Harvard's wealth, which grew from $4.8 billion in 1990 to $36.9 billion and the rapid pace Harvard opened new buildings. But since October the endowment has lost $8 billion dollars, with President Faust warning it could lose as much as $11 billion by the end of fiscal 2008. Now trash cans overflow, shuttles are fewer, and athletes have to suffer through continental breakfasts.

"Rich Harvard, Poor Harvard" is full of blind quotes pointing fingers at which administrator screwed which pooch. No matter who is responsible, though, one thing is clear:

"They are completely fucked."

To find out just how fucked Harvard is you have to buy the August edition of Vanity Fair. That is, unless you read our recap after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

In an "After the Recession" interview with the New York Times, today, President Obama slammed the quality of education at U.S. colleges in the age of grade inflation, naked parties, and IvyGate.

The somewhat convoluted criticism outlines the difference between the high school education his grandmother used to ascend to corporate vice presidency and the college education most kids are currently using to ascend the stairs of the local unemployment office. And he trashes the letter-writing skills of University of Chicago Law School students!

She went to work as a secretary. But she was able to become a vice president at a bank partly because her high-school education was rigorous enough that she could communicate and analyze information in a way that, frankly, a bunch of college kids in many parts of the country can’t. She could write —

Today, you mean?

THE PRESIDENT: Today. She could write a better letter than many of my — I won’t say “many,” but a number of my former students at the University of Chicago Law School.

So you're probably thinking where's the Ivy? Who needs to know how to write a letter when some can pull in six figures for kissing great ass? Excellent question, Watson! No matter what the name of the school is, the recession is slapping the meaning of employability across its status-obsessed face. And even Obama's Columbia-Harvard one-two doesn't mean a thing if you have no real abilities.

After the jump watch some Wharton students wipe their noses on the cuffs of their Thomas Pink shirts.

Read the rest of this entry »

Graduation season is mostly fun because it includes reunion season and the chance to gawk at what you've become. This year Princeton '04 will celebrate becoming criminals. Or so their reunion costumes seem to suggest. Since the class is advertising the black and orange striped inmate jersey (and tennis dress for the LAYDEES!), we're pretty sure this is not a hoax.

The poor-taste poke at Ivy Leaguers' role in the current swarm of coniving does sort of sound like something Princeton kids would do, though. (Although one grad blog did call the class's "We plead the 5th" theme perverse.) With the recent online bigotry, consistent corruption scandals, and vintage elitism, the costumes actually seem kind of eerily self aware. It would be awesome as such if there weren't so many starving children in Tennessee--though the Frist kids are probably fine.

Speaking of Harrison Frist, we're dying to see if he might shed some light on the Kimberly Taggart, an '04 panelist representing Goldman Sachs at the reunion, since Frist used to work there. Even deeper, we're curious if she's the same Kim Taggart that models for Victoria's Secret. (We're skipping the giggly blow-job joke for legal reasons.)

If this indeed all true, we want pictures. In my Walker Evans fantasy, there will be a white-collar convict party, a dustbowl filled with cocaine, and a George Clooney look-alike singing bluegrass songs about strip clubs.

More pictures after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recent Dartmouth graduate and current investment banker Ursula Grisham published a piece in the latest '08 Class newsletter that is unconsciously emblematic of the Ivy League’s blithe, proud role in this recession.

The letter, a warm smile towards the mirror, recounts Grisham's time as an investment banker in Europe. Reveling in her “ambitious, if not whimsical” career choice, she delves into the “aesthetic” dimensions of her experience—thus running like hell from every imaginable real-people consequence of having played house with the global financial system.

After comparing the walk home from her bank to walking home from a frat party, she pulls the blinders tighter:

“One could argue that if there ever were a good time to be in finance, it's now. There's no way to learn like being thrown into the middle of a raging storm.”

And the ideal of the liberal arts turned over in its grave. So as not to totally berate Ms. Grisham, there's a pretty well documented (and perhaps problematic) trend in the appeals of an Ivy-fueled finance career. As so many decorated coeds haven't learned in the career services office, i-banking on the brink is not about the welfare of billions but about massaging one's skill set into greater earning potential. Ivy Leaguers are among the only people at no risk of real hardship these days, and here we are, looking for the benefit.

What benefit? Check after the jump. It involves cash and Sarah Palin.

Read the rest of this entry »

In a sign the global financial crisis may have finally jumped the shark, Mary Flanagan, a Dartmouth "digital humanities" professor, created Layoff, a videogame that challenges you to fire as many workers as possible. The game isn't as mean as it sounds: Flanagan intended Layoff to be "part dark humor, part grim portent." In other words, it's a joke. There's a ticker flashing accounts of unscrupulous corporate decisions and you can hover over workers and get their bios (before you fire them). My favorite part: "The fired workers are replaced by new ones, including suit-wearing bankers and financiers, who cannot be laid off." How do you play the game? According to The Chronicle of Higher Ed:

The gamer is presented with an 11-by-8-inch grid populated by tiny workers—some wearing hard hats, some wearing glasses, some reading books, and some holding spare tires. The objective is to shuffle these characters into groups of three of a kind, at which point they can be banished to mill aimlessly about the unemployment line (a pen that resembles a prison yard below the grid).

After the jump, more screenshots! Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Unlike some other Ivy League schools, Penn will not be laying people off, initiating hiring freezes, or slashing budgets, said President Amy Gutmann in yesterday's university-wide email. In fact, things aren't so bad in Philadelphia. Gutmann writes:

As a result of the record-breaking success of our first year of the Making History campaign, coupled with the prudent choices we made before the economy worsened, we are well-positioned to weather the economic storm. We will continue to plan for the future just as we always have, by implementing sound budgets, by managing our costs, and by maintaining focus on our highest school and institutional priorities.

But what does "well-positioned" mean? According to Gutmann, it means Penn won't resort to any exceedingly unpleasant measures. She writes:

Penn's commitment to need-blind admissions and need-based financial aid remains resolute.

While we are not implementing broad-scale layoffs, hiring freezes, or across-the-board budget reductions, individual Schools and Centers have the flexibility to implement additional cost-cutting measures as needed to create balanced and sustainable budgets.

Sounds good. But what are these "additional cost-cutting measures?" According to this email, they involve not hiring more people and firing existing people. After the jump, Gutmann gives you the bad news.

Read the rest of this entry »

Now that we're officially in a recession and everyone's throwing around words like "death of the middle class," "what job market?" and "SPAM for every meal", perhaps you're having trouble keeping track of all the bad news. We're here to give you the rundown, Ivy-style. In this afternoon's installment of Recession Watch '08: Harvard is out $8 billion! Brown makes like Dartmouth and Cornell and imposes a hiring freeze! And Columbia looks to sell its private equity holdings (maybe)!

This morning, the New York Times reported that Harvard's endowment has lost $8 billion, or 22 percent of its value, in the last four months. In a letter to the deans, University President Drew Faust and Executive Vice President Edward C. Forst '82 said that the total loss in value will likely be closer to 30 percent by June, the end of the current fiscal year. Harvard's endowment is the largest in the country, and the $8 billion loss alone is larger than the endowment value of all but four other American universities (Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT). Read the rest of this entry »