Tue 17 Jun 2008
New York Magazine’s Intelligencer has published an item on the Harvard class of 2003, which has just recently celebrated its five-year reunion in Cambridge. And they would like to point out that unlike classes churned out by other schools with pretensions to empire, they are sickenly successful. Sorry, Williams!
Famous alums include NY Observer publisher Jared Kushner and actress/vegan footwear designer Natalie Portman. Twenty alums are worth over $10 million dollars. 2.5% make over $500,000 and 14% make over $150,000 per year. And while 37% make less than $50 grand, they are quick to point out that’s probably because they’re in grad school, the suckers.
And it’s not like they’re depressed workaholics, either: 40% have sex more than 7 times a month, and only 3% have children.
While it might be too late for the Williams ’03s to match the level of success, my fellow ’04s, there is still time for us…
June 17th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Fame, Fortune, and Sex…
What the heck is wrong with these people?!
Can’t they get their priorities right?
:-P
June 17th, 2008 at 10:44 am
P.S. My emoticon was not a smiley face, it was a ’sticking out of the tongue’ and making the pppffff noise!
June 17th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Why are we insecurely and neurotically preoccupied with Harvard? Do we believe that Harvard people wake in the morning and ask themselves “I wonder what Williams is doing today”?
June 17th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
well, at least I have more sex that the harvard grads. sadly, they could buy and sell me.
June 18th, 2008 at 1:16 am
Our submitter ignores the sage comment on the website: the true measure is the standard deviation, which would give you a better sense of how these distributions fall.
b) this is self reported.
June 18th, 2008 at 2:48 am
The preoccupation of our culture is self-gratification and fame, fortune and sex as it sells papers, magazines, television ads, and programming.
The unnatural obsession with all things material is the direct result of the preoccupation and predisposition of the primary core values of our consumer society.
This did not come about naturally. This was introduced to seduce the general population for maximum capital utilization. As a human resource, the penchant to extrude all possible emphasis on maximizing, in the broadest sense, real and imaginary needs.
Cache drives this equation. Our first schools were schools of theology and classical education. We graduated men of letters. Learning meant discipline and excellence.
Basic instincts today drive the nation.
Though Williams has a great endowment, as a Liberal Arts College, first it presides in the tradition of its classical definition: “a program of study designed to foster capacities of analysis, critical reflection, problem solving, communication, computation and synthesis of knowledge from different disciplines. Its goal is to provide students with an intellectual, historical, and social context for recognizing the continuity between the past and future and for drawing on the human capacity of reason to understand human experience, to question the value of dimension of human enterprise, and to articulate the results of this process of thinking.
Second, liberal arts education empowers: it provides a substrate for life in the imagination; it liberates us from the limitations of our own experience and opinions by proffering alternative views; it helps us to appreciate the fact that neither the easiest nor the most complex solution is necessarily the correct one. We learn to think, marshal evidence, and weigh the relative merits of different factors before committing to a plan of action.
Third, liberal arts education imparts a set of values that are necessary in order for human beings to live together in harmony. Society functions only as well as it produces good citizens. The concept of good citizenship is embodied by individuals who understand and take their responsibilities, who vote, who actively work for the betterment of society, especially by giving service to others. Finally, civic responsibility is a cornerstone of liberal arts education.
Liberal Arts Colleges are not career related. Their emphasis is on a personalized experience. Generally, liberal arts colleges assume you will be going to grad school for your career-specific training, emphasizing process rather than training. engagement rather than passive reception, and understanding rather than memorization.
Williams has a different student body type. You must also understand that you cannot compare a “Liberal Arts College” to a “University”. Liberal arts colleges are feeders to the Ivies and other major universities around the nation and the world.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:56 am
Tell it to David who believes that one ought to load up on the subject of statistics at Williams to the maximum extent.