Is Ivy League Really Better?

I am proud of where I attended college. When I applied to Trinity University you had to have extra-curricular's, you had to have good grades and you had to have an SAT score of about 1270. I thought that meant you were pretty smart. Having attending a private high school in Wilmington, DE most of my classmates went on to Brown, Smith or Bucknell and I figured that since I was one of the smarter kids at my school, my choosing to go to Trinity meant that it was just as good as any of the East Coast names.

After college I traveled to Australia to visit my High School best friend. All of her roommates attended big name East Coast schools, she herself was enrolled at Smith. The entire time I was there they made me feel as if I had gone to a lower class school just because it didn't have a big name and hundreds of years of history. They insinuated that my choice of college meant that I wasn't as smart as they were and that I wouldn't have as many opportunities as they would have. The trip was fun but the visiting side was disaster- I left feeling like less of a person- all because of the so- called caliber of my school.

I later went on to get a Masters degree from Trinity and although my old best friend went to law school at Syracuse, I know enough TU students who have gone on to graduate programs at same level or higher level schools to realize that perhaps your undergrad is more what you make it than the public opinion makes of it.

However this feeling of levels of education still persists. Ryan is attending Columbia University for his Masters degree. Does that mean he is smarter than me or just that he chose a different kind of program? Since it is an Ivy League school does that mean that the student body as a whole is smarter or better than the student body at Trinity or just different, or just from a different location? I would assume that the population of both schools would be heavily swayed toward their respective general geographic location. I wander through campus listening to conversations and wonder if I should be feeling inferior to the students I am passing or if we just both found schools that fit ourselves, our financial situation and our emotional situation at the time of application.

Then I stumble across comments like this one written in the elevator of our graduate level housing building.

And I feel brilliant.

Seriously? You are getting a Masters Degree or Phd from Columbia and you misspelled a word on a fourth grade spelling test?

Nice. You teacher should beladedly give you an F on that one.

Onward and Upward.