comes to fruition, where great minds from all  walks of life can come and be molded into the  

leaders of tomorrow. The reality, it turns  out, is much different. From inconsistent  

actual financial and professional outcomes for  graduates, to elitist college campuses built for  

the wealthiest students to succeed, to admissions  processes that do very little to actually improve  

diversity of identity or thought, to the very  unsavory products of Ivy League schools that  

lead you to question whether we should just  throw the whole system out with the wash (see,  

for example, Donald Trump, the Unabomber,  Steve Bannon, Ted Cruz, and Charles Davenport,  

the most influential eugenicist in the United  States, to name a few), the reality of the Ivy  

League and the damage that our obsession with  elite colleges does to our students and our  

society is incredibly bleak. This is why we should  abolish the Ivy League. Roll the intro.  

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Today I’m gonna discuss my own experience  with education and prestige having gone to  

law school and also a prestigious undergraduate  school. Then we’ll get into where the Ivy League  

even comes from and how even its origins are  problematic, plus why there’s so much hype  

about them in the first place. And then we’ll  get into the actual societal harms that come  

from concentrating so much power in the hands  of a few schools, and what needs to change.  

My experience with the Ivy League is that  I didn’t go to there. And it might be easy  

to then try to write me off as either not knowing  what I’m talking about or I’m just jealous because  

I didn’t get into my dream school or something.  That’s not the case. Not exactly, anyway. I went  

to Vassar College in undergrad, one of the Seven  Sisters, formerly all female schools that were  

created to provide women with the education they  were denied by sexist policies in the Ivy Leagues,  

and it’s part of a group of small colleges  called the “Little Ivies” which is frankly  

patronizing no thank you. It’s a prestigious  school but it’s not an Ivy League. I toured  

Brown but the guy who gave the tour was wearing  an argyle sweater vest and not in an ironic way,  

so I knew it was too square for me. But I  felt at home with the queers at Vassar.  

Law school was another story. If the disease  of prestige obsession hasn’t bitten you yet,  

it will when you think about applying for law  school. Some of my peers at Vassar got into Ivy  

League law schools and there was a period of time  when I thought that the only option was for me to  

get into an Ivy League law school, and if I didn’t  then like what was I even doing this for? It would  

mean that I wasn’t destined for greatness and  that just wasn’t an option. It’s a disease. I  

cried when I got my LSAT score back. I scored  in the 90th percentile. And I cried. Because I  

knew it wasn’t good enough for the Ivy League,  which typically only accepts scores in the 95th  

percentile and above, unless of course you have a  backdoor in, which we’ll get into. It’s a disease.  

Once I got over that and realized that I could do  a lot of good in the world without an Ivy League  

education, my practical brain turned back on and  I decided to go to a school where my LSAT score  

would get me a full ride scholarship, because I  didn’t know what exactly I wanted to do with my  

law degree, so saddling myself with six figures  of law school debt seemed like a bad idea.  

And THEREIN lies one of the many issues with Ivy  League schools–had I gotten a score good enough  

to get into an ivy league school but not good  enough to get a full ride to said ivy league,  

which you only get generally if you get a perfect  score on the LSAT or damn near it, then would I  

have been drawn in by the prestige and decided  fuck it give me 150k of debt I want Columbia  

on my resume? Honestly probably. And then I would  have gotten a prestigious big law job (which I did  

anyway) but instead of deciding 10 months in that  it was hell on earth and quitting, like I did,  

I would have been absolutely trapped under $2000  per month student loan payments. The freedom that  

NOT going to an ivy league gave me to forge my own  path and find a job that is unconventional and my  

absolute dream (YouTube) is absolutely priceless.  And the death grip that ivy league prestige has on  

people, especially millennials, leads many people  into situations that, had they listened to their  

gut and stayed true to themselves, they would  have never gone for. If given the opportunity,  

would you have attended an Ivy League  school?[a] Debt and all? [pause]  

To help you answer that question, let’s get  into some facts n figures, shall we?  

The Ivy League is seen internationally as the  gold standard for higher education in America  

and for intellectualism at large. That’s been  established over a very long history, one that  

is foundational to American colonialism and white  supremacy, and which benefited from the labor of  

minorities who were barred from attendance. There  are eight schools in the Ivy League: Harvard,  

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

All of them except Cornell were created before  the formation of the United States.  

Harvard was created in 1636, that’s before the  Salem witch trials, when the Massachusetts Bay  

Colony voted to create a college. It was  the first institution of higher education  

in the United States. The rest were founded  before the Revolutionary War in the 1700s,  

except for Cornell, which wasn’t founded until  1865. In the early years of the Ivy Leagues,  

schools were mainly attended by sons of wealthy  colonists where they studied rhetoric, math,  

and Latin, and often prepared for careers in  the church or in law. Students were almost  

exclusively white, wealthy, and male, for  literal centuries. The elite nature of the  

Ivy Leagues was baked in from the very beginning.  At Harvard’s first commencement ceremony in 1642,  

graduates walked across the stage in order of  their family’s standing in society. That process  

of ranking students by social status continued  for more than a century. Before the revolution,  

colleges were seen as instruments of Christian  expansion, part of the English strategy to  

maintain authority over colonies and assert  cultural superiority over indigenous and  

enslaved people. Early university trustees who  grew these schools into the institutions they  

are today were almost all engaged in the Atlantic  slave trade. Additionally, public universities  

benefited financially from the taxes collected  on the import and sale of enslaved Africans.  

Many of these universities benefited directly  from slave labor. Enslaved people maintained fire  

for heat, hauled water, prepared food, cleaned,  mended clothes, built and repaired the buildings,  

maintained the grounds, cultivated the land, and  kept the animals on rural campuses. While doing  

so, the very institutions that could run because  of the labor of enslaved people were developing  

the theories that justified white domination of  native lands and exploitation of slave labor,  

including eugenics and polygenesis, theories  that posit that white people are biologically  

superior to other races. These theories were  legitimized because they came from the most  

prestigious colleges in the land. They got the  ol Harvard stamp of approval. All the while  

receiving endowments from slave traders for  their medical schools and science facilities.  

Recent graduates of the schools would use  their school connections to apprentice and  

work for alumni who had made their fortunes in  the Atlantic slave trade. The wealth of cotton  

planters was given to schools to expand their  infrastructure. These schools became hostile  

to abolitionist activity and rhetoric, instead  favoring the American Colonization Society’s  

plan to send free blacks back to Africa. A literal slave auction was held on Princeton’s  

campus in 1766. Members of the University of  Pennsylvania faculty and alumni pushed for slavery  

to be enshrined in the US Constitution. According  to the book Ebony and Ivy, “There were arguably as  

many enslaved Black people at Dartmouth as there  were students in the college course.” Yale’s first  

set of scholarships were funded by the profits  of a slave plantation that was donated to the  

school. Its dining room, for centuries, featured  a stained glass window that showed Black people  

picking cotton. It was shattered by a Black  school employee in 2016. Icon. The residential  

colleges at Yale were headed by “masters,”  one even had the same layout as a Southern  

plantation and the housing in the back of it was  originally named the “slave quarters.” Until 2007,  

the Yale board of trustees would hold their  meetings under a massive painting depicting  

founder Elihu Yale with a couple other white dudes  being served by a young enslaved girl. YIKES.  

As to the origin of the term “ivy league”,  around the mid-1800s, students at Harvard began  

an ivy planting ceremony every year that included  “the ivy oration” or a speech given by a fellow  

classmate. That connection between ivy and elite  northeastern colleges continued until the 1950s,  

when a new athletics conference was created  between 8 elite northeastern colleges and  

was called The Ivy League. By the start of World War II,  

around 125 black students total had earned a  degree at an Ivy League school. Most schools  

did not admit women until the 60s and 70s. And  those efforts to admit women were met with strong  

push back from alumni and donors. One Princeton  alum declared, "If Princeton goes coeducational,  

my alma mater will have been taken away from me,  and PRINCETON IS DEAD." A Yale alum wrote a letter  

to the school’s alumni magazine, saying "Gentlemen  — let's face it — charming as women are — they get  

to be a drag if you are forced to associate with  them each and every day. Think of the poor student  

who has a steady date — he wants to concentrate  on the basic principles of thermodynamics,  

but she keeps trying to gossip about the idiotic  trivia all women try to impose on men." In a  

letter written to the Dartmouth board of trustees  in 1970, one alum lamented "For God's sake,  

for Dartmouth's sake, and for everyone's  sake, keep the damned women out."  

And despite years of affirmative action, and  showy lip service to increasing campus diversity,  

Ivy League schools continue to reflect their  exclusionary history. And that is a feature,  

not a design flaw. Most Ivy League schools  enroll more students from the top 1% than  

they do from the entire bottom 60%. Children  whose parents are in the top 1% are 77 times  

more likely to attend an Ivy League than those  in the bottom fifth. 15% of graduating seniors  

nationwide are black, while only 8% of students at  Ivy League schools are black. Legacy preference in  

the admissions process means that if your daddy  went to Harvard, you have a one in three chance  

of getting in, compared to a 6% chance for all  other applicants, perpetuating a lineage of white,  

wealthy attendees that goes back upwards of  16 generations, while black applicants, who  

were barred until very recently, have about one  generation of legacy to pull from.  

And I say that’s a feature, not a flaw, because  it serves the Ivy League well to maintain their  

elitist, exclusionary history. If you are born  in the bottom fifth of income distribution in  

America, your odds of reaching the top 20% of  earners sit at just 7.5%. It’s a lot easier to  

maintain wealth than to grow it from nothing.  So favoring wealthy students means producing  

wealthy alums who will donate money into the  multi-billion dollar endowment funds that each  

Ivy League school has. Funds that grew massively  during the pandemic to support institutions that  

also receive federal tax payer dollars and insane  tax exemptions, all while providing education  

to .4% of the college students in America. The  eight Ivy League colleges enroll around 68,000  

undergraduates out of 17 million total  undergraduates in the country, or .4%.  

And that exclusivity is part of the design. Each of the Ivy Leagues have the funds to expand  

and provide education to more students, but as  anyone who knows a thing or two about economics