Are Ivy League schools overrated?

Andrew:

I won’t actually answer the above question, as I am offering neither a rating of these schools nor a measure of how others rate them (which would be necessary to calibrate the “overrated” claim). What I am doing is responding to an email from Mark Palko, who wrote:

I [Palko] am in broad agreement with this New Republic article by William Deresiewicz [entitled “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League: The nation’s top colleges are turning our kids into zombies”] and I’ll try to blog on it if I can get caught up with more topical threads. I was particularly interested in the part about there being a “non-aggression pact” outside of the sciences.

This fits in with something I’ve noticed. I know this sounds harsh, but when I run across someone who is at the top of their profession and yet seems woefully underwhelming, they often have Ivy League BAs in non-demanding majors (For example, Jeff Zucker, Harvard, History. John Tierney, Yale, American Studies). My working hypothesis is that, while everyone who graduates from an elite school has an advantage in terms of reputation and networks, the actual difficulty of completing certain degrees isn’t that high relative to non-elite schools. Thus a history degree from Harvard isn’t worth that much more than a history degree from a Cal State school.