THE IVY LEAGUE TODAY

Some 9,000 will be accepted in the eight colleges of the Ivy League- out of 900,000 entrants (Birmingham's statistics) and this special designation confirmed the ""symbol of caste"" and special superiority this octet has traditionally enjoyed. While Birmingham would be the first to admit that there are other good schools, still there is a ""subtle"" difference- and by the time he has completed his ""case histories"" of the eight institutions in question (the plants, the attitudes of the students, activities, curricula, presidents, and faculty luminaries, etc., etc.) you too will be able to differentiate- and discriminate. At Yale, there's an air of dynamism; Harvard has the unassailable intellectual grandeur, freedom and nonconformism; Princeton- the casual Southern aristocratic elegance; moving downward statuewise, there's Columbia- ""distinguished but not chic"", Penn- poor Penn with ""psychic problems"" (you hardly know you're in the League), Dartmouth (his alma mater) and skiing, Cornell- and the Ivy Girls. Not to mention the men of distinction among the alumni- (long lists)- or to forget that a diploma from any one of these means more cold cash in the years to come.... One could think that a book such as this could only diminish the desirability of these ""prestige colleges"" which might be a very good thing- certainly for the 891,000 who face the anonymity of any one of some two thousand other campuses ahead and who might even be thinking about an education.