September 19, 2014

Where the Ivies Matter, Where They Don’t

By Eric Kelderman

In recent weeks, a gaggle of news outlets, including The Chronicle, have reported on and responded to William Deresiewicz’s book Excellent Sheep, the author’s latest and lengthy lament on the inadequacies of an Ivy League degree.

While Mr. Deresiewicz may be right—he argues that Ivy graduates are “anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose”—the amount of attention given to his book and the eight Ivy League colleges seems more than a little disproportionate to the overall role of those institutions in higher education.

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Sure, the Ivy League is the social and political petri dish for the nation’s future leaders. All nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court are graduates of Ivy law schools, and all but two of the major U.S. presidential candidates since 1988 have had degrees from Ivy League colleges.

But in many ways the eight colleges are an insignificant part of the higher-ed landscape.

Following are more ways that the Ivy League institutions are important or not.