First day of the fall semester featuring students from the Marshall School of Business at USC August 22, 2022 in Los Angeles, CA. Photo by David Sprague

The New “Ivy League” Schools

There are new “Ivy League” schools in town.

Schools such as Boston College and the University of Southern California are now emerging favorites for employers, who say they’re moving away from Ivy League graduates due to concerns over campus activism and antisemitism, the New York Post reports.

PRO-PALESTINE PROTESTS SPARK ACROSS THE COLLEGE CAMPUSES

Over the past few months, pro-Palestine protests have erupted across U.S. colleges, primarily on Ivy League campuses. The first protest test encampment went up in mid-April at Columbia University. Since then, protests have spurred at Ivy League schools, including Harvard, Brown, and Yale.

Some employers say they’re looking elsewhere for qualified grads, shifting their focus towards academic achievement and career readiness rather than Ivy League prestige.

“We don’t hire from the Ivy League,” Adam Leitman Bailey, who runs a law firm in Manhattan, tells The Post. “We want the person with the highest grades, who competed with their classmates and grew up without means and have drive. And we got the best candidates by going to the top of the class of the second and third tier schools.”

Schools such as Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, UNC Chapel Hill, University of Virginia, and University of Wisconsin Madison are recent emerging colleges that have been recognized for producing “smart, driven graduates.” All of these colleges recently made it onto Forbes’ “New Ivies” list.

“Those schools are being added to college lists and are being considered in a very similar light to the Ivy League,” Christopher Rim, college admissions consultant and Command Education CEO, tells The Post. “Our clients are wanting to get into Ivies and Ivy-plus schools — including these so-called ‘new Ivies.’”

Graduates from the “new Ivies” achieve impressive SAT scores averaging 1482 and ACT scores averaging 33, placing them among the top 10 percent of test takers.

“I think a big reason why employers are focusing on second-tier schools is because the quality of the students at the actual Ivies can be so low,” Rim says. “The Ivy League focuses so much on diversity, performative activism, and social impact causes at the expense of academics.”

Sources: New York Post, Forbes, PBS

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