UPDATED: Uh... Impending PR Disaster?

Updated: At exactly 7 PM, the University issued a press release that confirms Princeton was the only Ivy League school, aside from Penn (their acceptance rate increased by 0.1%), that saw a higher acceptance rate this year. Janet Rapelye admitted 9.79% of applicants, compared to 9.25% last year. An incredible 1,331 students were wait listed, though only half of them are expected to remain on it. It will be interesting to see how Princeton's administration will spin today's news.

It is 7 PM EST, and Princeton is the only Ivy League school that has not yet released its admissions data for the Class of 2013. Although Princeton is notoriously opaque and slow about these sort of things, it could be telling that no one has heard anything.

BKN

The economy: screwing high school seniors since '08

The Times reported yesterday that in the face of shrinking endowments, universities are increasingly choosing wealthier applicants that can foot the full ticket of an education over students that would need financial aid if admitted.

Coupled with the fact that Ivies' (and other selective college's) acceptance rates are dropping, high school juniors across the nation have collectively just sighed a massive "fuck my life."

(image © Hasbro)

WAS

Those Incestuous Ivies!

Today's New York Times ran an article heralding the new Dartmouth College president, Dr. Jim Yong Kim (full story here). What caught our attention, though, was the headline: “Dartmouth Selects Its New President from Harvard.” An Ivy League president with ties to (gasp!) a different Ivy?

There’s something unique about that Crimson, though, that makes the Times’ college-cum-university presidential supercenter inference especially apt. Kim’s hiring will make three out of the seven Ivy League presidents educated at some point at Harvard. For those of you at home keeping score, Penn’s Amy Gutmann got her B.A. from Radcliffe and her Ph.D. from Harvard and Brown’s Ruth Simmons received a Ph.D. from Harvard.

Granted, Dr. Kim is inextricably linked to Harvard: in addition to working as an official at Harvard Med School, he got his Ph.D. in Anthropology and his M.D. at Harvard. But the article buries that fact that Kim also went to Brown undergrad, in the same paragraph that mentions his football prowess at his Iowa high school (he was a quarterback).

What consolation is there for us at Princeton? Well, three out of the seven Ivy presidents have at some point taught here: Gutmann, Simmons, and of course Shirley. So we’ve got that going for us.

SKG

Making Harvard proud

Larry Summers, head of Obama's National Economic Council and once-beloved Harvard president, attended yesterday's "fiscal sustainability summit" in the White House. For the event, Obama convened over a hundred policy makers and intellectuals to discuss bipartisan approaches to deficit reduction.

If anyone was wondering why Larry was a bit quiet during the whole thing, well, the Financial Times reports that "Lawrence Summers . . . fell asleep on the podium." Falling asleep in the audience is understandable, sure, but the podium? It's enough to make Rick Santelli mad!

The good news for students is that apparently Harvard's unofficial motto now extends to the White House: "The hard part is getting in."

WAS

(image source: ustreas.gov)