Behind The Ivy: The Truth Behind Ivy League Opportunities | Opinion

By Elias M.’22

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and the University of Pennsylvania. 

These eight universities, with a combined endowment of over $142 billion dollars, have played a cornerstone role in this country. They’ve become a cultural, academic, historical, and political behemoth in today’s society. Graduates include 16 U.S. presidents, and countless other senators, congressmen, CEOs, and world leaders. Looking at their list of alumni, one could easily assume that there’s just something about an Ivy League education that sets someone above the rest. 

As a Junior applying to colleges in a few months, I’ve been playing a mental tug-of-war, weighing the (literal) costs and benefits of attending one of these 8 top universities. I’ve been asking myself:

What is it about Ivies that cause their graduates to have such great success? 

And the answer: Money.

With tuition reaching almost $80 thousand dollars a year, those able to afford it are already born into opportunities. At Brown University, in Rhode Island, for example, tuition caps out at almost $78,000 dollars, yet only about half of students are receiving any financial aid. Only a mere 29% of students come from households making less than $75,000 a year, and well over 50% of students come from households making more than $110,000 a year. Those attending Brown and paying full tuition (about half of their student body) are amongst the top 9% of American families. Money lends itself to opportunity. 

Students coming from more affluent families are going to have more opportunities to succeed than their lesser affluent classmates, no matter what school they attend. So it’s no wonder why these students are extremely successful; half of their students already are starting with a leg up in life. 

According to CollegeVine, an online college resource site for high schoolers, “(E)lite schools do have disproportionately wealthy students in general, and the Ivies are no exception”. They listed the 10 colleges and universities in the country that had the highest concentration of students in the “top 1%”. The colleges included places like Tufts, Trinity, & Colorado College. To my surprise, there was no Ivy Leagues in this list. 

Reassuringly, they noted later that “(S)tudents from families in the top 1%—those who make more than $630,000 a year—are 77 times more likely to be admitted to and attend an Ivy League school than students coming from families who make less than $30,000 a year.” 

I reached out to Dr. Mark B. Myers, a former visiting professor at Stanford University, and Wharton, UPenn’s graduate school of business. He is a former senior V.P. of the Xerox Corporation.

“The opportunities I had coming out of (non-Ivy League schools) were such that I was able to make a lot of advances career-wise”, he told me. He said that an Ivy League education itself wouldn’t have provided him with any more career advances. 

I’ve come to believe that it’s not the quality of professors or the intelligence of the students that give Ivy League students all these extra openings in life, (although both significant factors). 

It’s the money. 

It’s that students at these schools are not successfull mainly because of tools the schools provide, but instead the tools that their backgrounds provide them. 

It’s not the schools that draw people to apply; it’s the other students who are applying.

It’s a congregation of social climbers, hoping to gain access to the tools that their classmates backgrounds and wealth bring with them.