Website Lets You Into Harvard—Free

Elite universities profit from acting interested in unqualified students

(NEWSER) - Ivy League schools cram high school students' mailboxes full with glossy recruitment packages, only to greet them weeks later with far less appealing rejection letters. Critics say elite universities like Harvard and Columbia set up potential applicants for disappointment by wooing them with pamphlets, posters, and promise, pocketing hefty application fees of up to $90 from students who have little chance of actually getting accepted, Bloomberg reports. More»

...and Yale

(NEWSER) - Take that, haters: You may not like Amy Chua's parenting style, but it has apparently returned a child that is Harvard material. And Yale material. Sophia, 18, is currently deciding between those institutions, reports the Boston Herald . And Chua isn't taking credit for the acceptances. "I don’t think my parenting had anything to do with it," she told the paper. Of course, her connections probably didn't hurt: Chua and hubby Jed Rubenfeld are both Harvard grads ... who work at Yale. But Sophia does have that Carnegie-Hall-debut-at-14 thing on her resume... Click to read just how few students Harvard accepted . More»

If you didn't graduate from Harvard, good luck getting a top job

(NEWSER) - If you’re determined to get a great job, you might want to quit your course of study at Cornell or Dartmouth and transfer to one of the "top 5" schools: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Wharton. A new study shows that recruiters for the best law firms, investment banks, and consultancy firms are only looking at graduates of those schools, Business Insider reports. And even if you’re one of those elite grads, recruiters want to make sure you’re not—in their words—"boring," a "tool," or a "bookworm." More»

Giving to 'Affirmative Action for Rich' is 'moral crime,' writes Hamilton Nolan

(NEWSER) - Gawker's Hamilton Nolan is scrambling onto the anti-Ivy League bandwagon by slamming donations to the elitist institutions as "loathsome" and a "moral crime." The schools "are terrible choices for huge donations. Supporting education is a worthy cause; but there are many, many more effective ways to help the masses than giving millions to Ivy League schools. No matter what those schools' endowment officers tell you, they do not really 'need,' that money," stews Nolan. Furthermore, most donors are not seeking to improve education; "they give in order to make it easier for their own children to get into those schools," he adds. More»

These schools offer a good return on investment

(NEWSER) - Which colleges pay off? PayScale crunched the numbers to compute the best returns on investment—by comparing the cost of a degree against what its students earn upon graduation—and Huffington Post rounds up the best of the bunch:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: annual ROI: 12.6%; 30-year ROI: $1.69 million
2. California Institute of Technology: 12.6%; $1.64 million
3. Harvard: 12.5%; $1.63 million
4. Harvey Mudd College: 12.5%; $1.63 million
5. Dartmouth: 12.4%; $1.59 million