Just like Blair on Gossip Girl has dreamed of going to Yale since childhood, many students simply won’t be happy unless they are accepted to an Ivy League school. Some are driven since birth to maintain a perfect educational reputation, and some will do whatever it takes to attend the school of their dreams. In the end, is it worth the extreme hard work and dedication? After all, what’s in a name, as long as you get a top education and don’t owe more than what your parent’s house is worth when it is all said and done.

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Getting in to the college of your choice is harder than ever these days. Competition is stiff, and space is limited. Colleges have the difficult job of hand selecting their prospective freshman classes, and unfortunately have to reject thousands of talented and bright students. The result? A mass number of rejection letters, often hitting kids harder than a break-up.

Rejected: photo via WSJ.com

“Even with impressive test scores and grades, abundant extracurricular activities, good recommendations and an admission essay into which ‘I poured myself heart and soul,’ Daniel Beresford, 18, netted 14 rejection letters from 17 applications.” Beresford was denied by Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago. (He’s bound for one of his top choices, Pepperdine.)

Here are some of the cruelest and kindest rejection letters from colleges and universities. Read the rest of this entry »

Just before YouTube EDU was unveiled, Academic Earth came online, and very quickly the “free college video” niche created some formidable competition. While YouTube EDU is an aggregation of all the existing education-related content on the video leader’s site, Academic Earth is the brain child of Richard Ludlow.

He was a Yale student, studying linear algebra, and sought additional information online to help him through the course. What he found was a full-length course via video with Gilbert Strang, an MIT math professor. He figured he wasn’t the only one seeking this kind of information, and after doing research learned that educational resources online were scattered across many different resources. Thus, he brought them together at Academic Earth. Read the rest of this entry »

Fueled by endowment gains and tuition increases, universities in recent years have gone on a building, faculty and program expansion spree. I have personally seen it in the law school realm. Instead of the historical 12-credit loads, the norm over the past few years in law schools has trended towards nine to ten credits. This allowed for more research, but also meant that the faculty needed to expand to continue offering the same course levels. Salaries also rose as law schools and other areas of universities competed for top talent.

But the same forces buffeting the general economy are affecting the university.

Yale recently froze all faculty salaries for employees paid more than $75,000, and Harvard froze all faculty salaries at its arts and sciences school. The big private, elite universities appear to be particularly at risk. To understand why, let’s take a look at the Harvard endowment.

Read more at New York Times

During a summer job when I was in college, I was chatting with a fellow college student.  I asked her where she went to school.

“At a school in Connecticut,” she said.

“Where at?” I asked.

“New Haven,” she said, sort of blushing.

“Oh, you go to Yale!” I said, “How cool is that?”

I wonder how many other Ivy League students out there answer the question “where do you go to school?” with such an evasive response.  Perhaps she thought that others would think she was a snob, or that they would think that she was bragging, if she answered the question directly.  I, for one, certainly didn’t think less of her, quite the opposite.

But isn’t this a shame?  On the one hand, Americans admire Ivy League educations, and because of this, the names on their transcripts can open some doors.  On the other hand, there’s a powerful undercurrent of distrust of intellectualism in America.  Whether it’s high school students mocking the smart kids, or college girls playing down their intelligence in class, or Fox News accusing Barack Obama of being an “elite” because he went to Columbia and Harvard, people are a little distrustful of those who have brains, an education, and the desire to work hard in their studies.  Read the rest of this entry »

President George W. Bush’s college records have often been mocked, as Bush was a solid C student at Yale University.  However, Bush’s Yale experience went significantly better than Vice President Dick Cheney’s. Cheney actually flunked out of Yale.

In fact, young Dick Cheney had a bit of wild youth.  He was arrested twice for drunk driving charges in the early 1960s in Wyoming, where he worked as a lineman for a power company.  He did finally go back to school, although, as the New York Times has suggested, this may have had more to do with wanting to avoid getting drafted into Vietnam than it did with wanting to get an education.

In 1963, Cheney enrolled at Casper Community College in Casper, Wyoming.  Later that year, he transferred to the University of Wyoming at Laramie, where he earned a BA and an MA in political science.  He also began doctoral work in political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, but he did not finish.

Cheney’s grades for his undergraduate and graduate work are not available, and apparently are in an undisclosed location.

George W. Bush wasn’t the best college student around.  But at least he’s been up front about his college record, unlike Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Sarah Palin. John McCain, on the other hand, has been quite upfront about the fact that he was ranked 894 out of 899 in the Naval Academy.

In fact, George W. Bush has openly released his Yale University undergraduate transcript.  As you can see, Bush truly was a solid C student.  He never got an A in anything the entire time that he was in college (although he never got a D or an F either).  Bush almost got As in history and anthropology, and earned a high pass in Japanese, of all things.  However, he received a 71 and a 73 respectively in his two political science and government classes.  His lowest grade was in sociology — a 70.

Bush earned a 1206 on the SATs, which is pretty good.  These days, though, a 1200 won’t get you anywhere near Yale, so I wonder how true that was back then, and how much Bush’s father’s connections had to do with getting him in.