Tony Blair Nervous on First Day of School

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»

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»

It will open liberal arts school within national university

(NEWSER) - Yale plans to open a liberal arts college in Singapore, and has bigger plans of reshaping higher education in Asia. Yale-NUS—it's a partnership with the government-run National University of Singapore—is planned as a highly selective college that would draw talented students from all over Asia, where liberal arts programs remain rare. Yale would hire 100 professors to teach a planned student body of 1,000, the New York Times reports. More»

Enough already with Harvard and Yale: blogger

(NEWSER) - The Supreme Court and White House may as well be decorated in ivy, complains David Bernstein. "Once Elena Kagan gets confirmed, every Supreme Court Justice will have attended Harvard or Yale law schools," he writes. And Kagan—whose bachelor's degree, for the record, is from Princeton—was nominated by a Harvard-educated president who beat Yale and Harvard opponents to succeed a Yalie who himself succeeded ... oh, you get the picture. More»

(NEWSER) - Harvard and Yale remain the richest schools in the US, but both are getting a lesson in economics. The endowments of the Ivy Leaguer shrank by about 30% over the last year thanks to risky investments, reports Bloomberg. Harvard's fell $11 billion to $26 billion and Yale's dropped $7 billion to $16 billion. Both had moved aggressively into private equity and hedge funds over the past decade, and are now retooling strategies. More»