Dear IvyLeagueAsia:
Please go back to your ORIENTED profile and indicate your email address therein. In my opinion that is necessary in order for people to get in touch with you.
Cheers.
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Originally posted by ivyleagueasia: To receive this list, please email the following information to [IvyLeagueAsia@yahoo.com](mailto:IvyLeagueAsia@yahoo.com)
Um, Richard?
Yes, obviously the original post was a joke.
The Ivy League = Good Old Boys Network. It has nothing to do with brains and everything to do with connections. I thought everybody knew this. Its “Legacy” programs are affirmative action for rich white kids. Unfortunately, I was unfortunate enough to have the bad taste to be born both lower-middle-class and white, so I am incapable of deriving any benefits from either forms of affirmative action.
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Originally posted by mod lang: Its "Legacy" programs are affirmative action for rich white kids. Unfortunately, I was unfortunate enough to have the bad taste to be born both lower-middle-class and white, so I am incapable of deriving any benefits from either forms of affirmative action.
Having a bad life?
Give the guy a break. He may have confused this forum for “rich-expats-in-Taiwan”, but he didn’t intend on flaunting to you.
Yeah, the whole world’s out to get you. Tainan is the perfect place to hide for a while.
help me here…networking is a great way to meet like minded people…and by actively participating in one, one can garner much information and make mutually beneficial aquaintances (and the “active” part helps weed out the wannabees)
yet, i dont see the point in networking ONLY “Ivy League” school alumni, especially in taiwan…what? all four of you want to shoot the bull? start something new here guy…something the old boys back home would be proud of…finding highly motivated well educated people in taiwan is pretty easy…but the “Ivy League” stamp of approval doesnt make sense…
hell, if you guys wanna talk about market conditions and investing, business and finance, i am so there…alas, my state university degree bars me from playing with you…but i’ll try my best to get my son in your network…
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Yeah, the whole world's out to get you. Tainan is the perfect place to hide for a while.
No, not whining…just pointing out the obvious. I have an okay life. But poking fun at people born on third base thinking they hit a triple is always the right thing to do – we need more of it these days, considering the kind of Good Boys Network Beneficiaries running the U.S.A. these days. Besides, like I said, the original post was obviously a joke.
poor you.
i knew plenty of poor kids(both white and non-white) who relied completely on grants and scholarships to pay their way through school. but of course, since they went to an ivy league school and you didn’t, they must be dumb rich brats born on 3rd base.
it’s ok, those grapes were probably sour anyway…
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Originally posted by mod lang:No, not whining…just pointing out the obvious. I have an okay life. But poking fun at people born on third base thinking they hit a triple is always the right thing to do – we need more of it these days, considering the kind of Good Boys Network Beneficiaries running the U.S.A. these days. Besides, like I said, the original post was obviously a joke.
Oh, lay off the attitude for a minute, willya? Geez. I went to college on scholarship, too. Where’s the bitterness in pointing out that America, like most (all) countries has a class system, that the Ivy League is a part of? That’s just fact. Sure, there are poor minorities that get into Ivy League schools on scholarship, but most of the student body is made up of people whose parents pay their way through – colleges can’t turn a profit if most of their students are on scholarship. Don’t attack the messenger for telling it the way it is – being an Ivy League graduate has less to do with brains than money and connections. After all, plenty of non-Ivy League schools like MIT outperform the Ivy League academically. The good old boy network exists – you’re going to deny this? Deny that America doesn’t have a class system where a dullard incompetent like Dubya can rise to president through no effort of his own, but on the strength of his family name & connections? Puh-leeze. It’s no more bitterness to point out classism than it is for an ethnic minority to point that yes, racism exists in America.
it might surprise you to learn that all ivy league schools spend more money on the students than they take in from tuition. also the case at many top tier “ol’ boys’ network” schools like mit, stanford, and caltech(caltech had such a huge spending-per-student figure that they had to rework the usnews ranking system to stop caltech from taking first place every year).
but how can this be if the schools are in it for profit? news flash, the schools are NOT in it for profit. in fact, all the top universities are non-profit organizations(perhaps you should check stuff like this out before making wild false accusations). they compete with each other to see who can put out the best financial aid packages and who can raise the most money from alumni to add improvements to the schools. that’s what makes the us private university system the best in the world.
the good ol’ boys network exists at cornell and columbia about as much as it exists at berkeley, michigan, or florida state.
let’s try some hard numbers shall we?
using sat scores as the best statistical indicator we have of academic achievement, harvard students scored much higher than berkeley students(berkeley being the highest rated public school in the last survey):
harvard class of 2000 -
SAT I scores (25/75 percentile):
Verbal: 710 - 790
Math: 700 - 790
Combined: 1410 - 1580
cal class of 2000 -
SAT I scores (25/75 percentile):
Verbal: 580 - 710
Math: 620 - 740
Combined: 1200 - 1450
with these figures, i assert that the student body at harvard is indeed more academically accomplished than the student body at berkeley.
the student body at harvard has almost the same % of students receiving financial aid. they receive a much higher amount, but because of the high cost of the school, their debt burden comes out almost equal:
harvard -
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/directory/drfinaid_2155.htm
cal -
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/directory/drfinaid_1312.htm
with these figures, i assert that the socio-economic composition of a harvard class is not that significantly different from the socio-economic composition of a berkeley class.
i now anxiously await your own facts and figures to prove that:
1.) students at ivy league/“ol’ boys’ network” schools are dumber than students at fairer merit-based schools
and
2.) students at ivy league schools are all rich
I have to agree with Flipper. When I was at Yale, I think I heard 40% were on financial aid. I grew up on a farm and worked every summer sweating it in the tomato fields from the age of 11 to 18. We had a small family farm with only family workers. Can u top that mod lang? I got lots of scholarship money. Legacies were the exception rather than the rule. My roomate from the public housing project Co-op City in the Bronx is now a professor/scholar at Princeton. It’s not Yale’s fault I didn’t want to be an investment banker. As far as I’m concerned, the Ivies are the fastest way to climb the social ladder for a poor smart kid. My problem with them is that they should require some sort of public service in return for all the thousands they give in scholarship money- similar to some aid packages I’ve heard of for doctors who have to pay it back by working for a number of years in a ‘hard-ship’ location like a very rural part of the US or an Indian reservation. Now the Ivies are a lot different from when I went there. They have a much higher percentage of international students.
You’re right. According to the stats you linked to, only 53% of the students at Harvard are rich (that is, able to afford $26,019 tuition – and that’s just tuition alone! – without resorting to financial aid). Anyone who can afford to blow over $36,000 dollars a year to attend college comes from a rich (or at least upper-middle-class) family. So technically I am correct that most of the students at Harvard come from well-off families, even if it appears to be a slimmer margin than I originally suspected.
Now, I know that some will protest that being able to spend $36,000 a year out of your own pocket on college doesn’t make a family rich, because 90% of Americans identify themselves as “middle class” (that mysteriously broad category that somehow everyone from highschool janitors to heart surgeons feel they belong to). They are just in denial – $35,000 is the GDP per capita in the U.S. according to the stats, so in order to go to Harvard without a scholarship, you must pay out more money than most Americans make at their jobs in one year. Anyone capable of paying that much for schoolin’ is rich any way you cut it.
quote[quote] I grew up on a farm and worked every summer sweating it in the tomato fields from the age of 11 to 18. We had a small family farm with only family workers. Can u top that mod lang? [/quote]Um, yeah, and so can most people I know. Working a minimum wage job that requires hard physical labor? Who hasn’t done that sort of thing to put themselves through school or earn a living? So let’s not swap hard luck stories and boast about who grew up the poorest. Where I come from that’s called poor-mouthing. And your family did own their own land, which makes your family better off than most families I knew back home.
Sorry, but you didn’t make me feel sorry for you. Good old boy Bush got elected because the people who voted for him are dumb asses, not because he had Skull and Bones behind him. Education is the way up. Did your family move to an area because of the excellence of it’s school district renting a small apartment there so that you could take advantage of a good school system? Did your father work 6 days a week 12 + hours a day so that there be money to send you to tutoring school? If you had older brothers or sisters or other older relatives around, did they help you with your school work? These are all things that Chinese immigrants do to ensure their kids have a good education. I spent a week last summer tutoring 4 of my Chinese-American nephews who had to live with us since they live far away. Before that I would give them lessons over the phone and via email. Their father drives one of those shuttle buses that goes between the hotels and the airport and their mom works in a factory. My other roomate came from Macau with her family when she was two. Her mother worked in a garment sweat shop and her father took classes and worked in an auto shop, finally opening his own shop. This roommate grew up in Boston and qualified to go to one of the magnet schools. She is a corporate lawyer.My husband is a cook in the casinoes. The employees there, many of which are recent immigrants, get jerked around all the time by management. But do they elect a good Union President? NO. They aren’t involved. So take a little responsibility. People with drive can make it in the US.
quote[quote] Sorry, but you didn't make me feel sorry for you.[/quote]Yeearghh! Will you guys quit twisting this around? My point wasn’t to make anybody feel sorry for me. I don’t feel sorry for myself. Are people in this forum so insecure they always have to attack the poster instead of what he writes?
And V, you missed my point about poor-mouthing. Boasting about how tough you’ve had it is not attractive. But now here we go again with a silly contest to see who can brag about who grew up the poorest.
median household income(for a 4-person family) in the us in 2000 was around $62k per year. many of the east coast states which send the majority of kids to the ivies have median household incomes in the mid $70k’s up to $80k.
http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/4person.html
might i suggest taking a refresher course in statistics?
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Originally posted by mod lang: You're right. According to the stats you linked to, only 53% of the students at Harvard are rich (that is, able to afford $26,019 tuition -- and that's just tuition alone! -- without resorting to financial aid). Anyone who can afford to blow over $36,000 dollars a year to attend college comes from a rich (or at least upper-middle-class) family. So technically I am correct that most of the students at Harvard come from well-off families, even if it appears to be a slimmer margin than I originally suspected.Now, I know that some will protest that being able to spend $36,000 a year out of your own pocket on college doesn’t make a family rich, because 90% of Americans identify themselves as “middle class” (that mysteriously broad category that somehow everyone from highschool janitors to heart surgeons feel they belong to). They are just in denial – $35,000 is the GDP per capita in the U.S. according to the stats, so in order to go to Harvard without a scholarship, you must pay out more money than most Americans make at their jobs in one year. Anyone capable of paying that much for schoolin’ is rich any way you cut it.
we’ve already shown that there are plenty of students from less well-off economic backgrounds at ivy league schools. maybe you should stop blaming your rejection from those schools on the “ol boys’ network” working to keep you down…
Fuck you, Flipper, you go out of your way to deliberately miss my point and invent out of thin air things I never said. You must be a really insecure little person. You are proof that just because someone has a degree doesn’t mean that they are capable of reading comprehension: per capita GDP doesn’t mean “household income”, it means “individual income”, as anyone can plainly see. Stop snooting your pompous nose when you don’t even know what “per capita” means. And stop accusing me of having “sour grapes” and “feeling bitter” just because my opinion on American class politics differs from Horatio Alger’s.
Mod lang, the US isn’t perfect, but we have the power to change things, or have you heard of some gulags in the US I haven’t? You must have not had the same speeches I had as a kid, like ‘life isn’t fair’ or ‘you can be whatever you want’ or ‘some people think the world owes them a living’. I’ve been involved in union organizing and campaign finance reform while you just seem to be a complainer.
true, the world is unfair…but at least in Taiwan, it seems to be unfair in my favor…
quitcherbitchin…getting in to any good school means little…graduating is what matters, right? learning something matters, right? doing something that betters yourself and the people around is what matters, right?
“never underestimate the power of the individual to change history”…that quote doesn’t say anything about the RICH or POOR individual…
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Originally posted by mod lang: Fuck you, Flipper, you go out of your way to deliberately miss my point and invent out of thin air things I never said.
“The Ivy League = Good Old Boys Network. It has nothing to do with brains and everything to do with connections.”(ivy league students are dumb and rich)
“…most of the student body is made up of people whose parents pay their way through – colleges can’t turn a profit if most of their students are on scholarship.”(ivies are in it for the money)
“…being an Ivy League graduate has less to do with brains than money and connections.”(ivy league students are dumb and rich)
just 3 examples of statements you’ve made that i felt were wrong and therefore responded to with facts and figures. no, i didn’t invent them out of thin air.
always a sign that once someone has to resort to a comeback like “fuck you”, they’ve run out of things to say. i’ll stop picking on you now since you obviously are taking this way too seriously. maybe next time you’ll learn not to make absurdly broad and often times patently false statements to back up your claims. if you are going to get so emotionally riled up over a message board discussion, perhaps it would be better to stay away from the internet altogether…
btw, i know what “per capita” means, but it has absolutely no relavence to this discussion at all. when colleges calculate how much tuition a family can afford, they look at family income. gdp per capita has nothing to do with how many people can afford college. gdp per capita is not useful as a statistic since it’s just dividing gdp by the number of people in the country. if you want some real numbers, go to the census site which i linked earlier.