Who needs Harvard? Send us your best and brightest

By Mark Kingwell. Last week, in an essay for the New Republic, “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League,” former Yale professor William Deresiewicz continued his assault on the values of America’s top universities, drawing on a stint serving with an admissions committee. Far from being the elite institutions of learning they pretend to be, he argued, the Ivy League has become a training ground for clever, self-involved yet biddable youngsters – “out-of-touch, entitled little shit[s],” to quote one of them – who make especially good fodder for the morally bankrupt financial sector. More...