Talk:Big Three (colleges)

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[edit] Agreed, this article is rather suspect?

Why is the "WASP establishment" pertinent to this article? Are these three schools really referred to as the "Big Three" anymore? & how did Princeton squirm into the H-Y rivalry?

Princeton has always been there. And the WASP establishment is quite pertinent because it is that establishment that created the schools' reputation in the first place. The Jerome Karabel book cited goes into the history in great detail.

However, I have to point out that Princeton does have a graduate school of architecture as well as important doctoral programs. It is not simply an undergraduate institution.

[edit] This is the stupidest fucking article

This article personifies the silliness of wikipedia. Anyone who supposes this web of mysterious references to the "WASP establishment" and quotes from the personal musings of obscure men with ridiculous names qualifies as an encyclopedia article is daft. The page should be deleted.

[edit] "In the past?"

I'm not going to fuss too much about recent edits that have qualified everything in the article by saying "in the past." Certainly the influence of the WASP establishment in the United States has been declining steadily ever since the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, a glance at Colleges and Universities Attended by the Presidents does not show any MIT or Berkeley alums. Stanford is represented only by a single president (Hoover), no more than the "little Ivies" Amherst and Williams, despite being a far larger school.

If we included recent presidential candidates, the pattern would be similar.

I think the article currently has tipped a bit too far in the direction of wishful thinking. The United States has not become a meritocracy, and U. S. News and World Report continues to rank Harvard, Yale and Princeton highly because, in the United States, these colleges still do have a special status—indeed, the fact that U. S. News ranks them relatively higher than the international rankings do confirms this. Dpbsmith (talk) 01:45, 22 June 2006 (UTC)