What’s the best school in the Ivy League?

It’s a tough time to be at an Ivy. The hopes of your entire family rest on you, everyone knows 90 percent of you are legacies (and if you’re not, everyone thinks you are) – and out in California, people at Stanford and Berkeley are getting just as respected a degree as you AND a tan.

There’s one thing every Ivy student has in common though – they all think they go to the best school in the country.

It’s time to settle this once and for all – because your football league can’t.

We asked some Ivy kids to share their thoughts on their rival schools – but they ended up just listing ways in which they suck.

Brown

“TW: words, opinions, images

“Brown, let’s face it, isn’t the school it used to be. Once it was Harvard’s cooler dope-smoking cousin, a flannel-shirted array of hemp plants and Al Gore bumper stickers. Then something changed – maybe the old crowd is still there somewhere, too stoned in their hotboxed dormrooms to form a vocal alternative,  but today if you head to Brown, you’re basically enrolled at Tumblr University.

“The only interesting story anyone knows about Brown – that Emma Watson’s classmates used to yell ’10 points to Gryffindor’ at her every time she answered a question in class resulting in her departure – isn’t even true. And unlike other Ivies, they don’t even have grades – everything is pass-fail (rumor has it you get marked down for not checking your privilege).

“Less smart than Yale, and not as fun as Dartmouth – unless designing witty placards gives you a euphoric sexual thrill, you’re gonna have a shitty time here.”

Columbia

“Columbians don’t need to be told they live in the greatest city on earth but you wouldn’t know it from visiting. Their area of Manhattan is mostly famous for having that grimy diner from Seinfeld and 1020, where undergrads and postgrads pick fights over whose bar it is.

“Trust Columbia to pick the only few blocks in New York where nothing happens. The football team, despite their best efforts, is awful and has infected the rest of the campus, which is anxious to do well in life and begs to be taken seriously. At least our fencing team is the best in the nation, they might hit back, but there’s a reason why kids aspire to baseball and basketball and not a living room activity born out of drunken Frenchmen flailing at each other with sticks.”

Cornell

“Is Cornell even an Ivy League school? No one is sure, not even Cornellians themselves, who have committed to walking uphill in the bitter cold for four years as the only way to prove themselves. ‘Turned around, got 180 degrees from Cornell’ is one of the (many) jokes the other Ivies tell about their middle-of-bumblefuck neighbor. Cornell has more Greek life than any other Ivy – but if you think that means it’s “the fun one,” think again because they’re more about bureaucracy than they are beer.

“Cornellians nurse their inferiority complex by firmly maintaining to be the best at things no one else even tries to be good at (read: the hotel school, industrial labor relations, ice hockey, etc). It’s a last resort, but let’s face it — so is everything else about Cornell.”

Dartmouth

“Where is Dartmouth? Seriously – where the fuck is it? An extensive Google Maps session tells me it’s closer to Quebec than it is to any other Ivy (read: civilized society).

“If you want the prestige of attending an elite school but still yearn for the watery beer-soaked bro lifestyle of a party school, you’d find Dartmouth something of an unhappy compromise. You’ll find it comfortably bringing up the rear of most academic Ivy rankings, while not promising quite enough fun to make up for the withering stares Harvard and Princeton grads will give you across the JP Morgan boardroom when you’re working for them.

“Draconian drinking rules have recently soured Dartmouth’s claim to the “most fun Ivy” crown. You arrive expecting Animal House and end up living Boardwalk Empire.”

Harvard

“You’ve been working on the common app since the fourth grade, so finally getting to Harvard as a freshman is in some ways a year of post-coital bliss. Never mind you probably won’t be having any actual sex, you’ll be rubbing shoulders with talented geniuses from around the world, who like you, were made to endure endless piano practice, summer school and Model United Nations to get here. You’ve earned this. There is one drawback though. It’s annoying no other college is as nationally reviled as much as Harvard, except maybe West Virginia State, or Yale.

“While you may take some pride in knowing you’re one of the smartest, most capable students on earth, you still haven’t figured out how to answer the awful, idiot phrase you hear every time you venture out of Cambridge: Oh, so you go to Harvard?”

Penn

“You know how most schools named after their home state are the public university? The University of Pennsylvania is actually private – and boy will they not shut up about it. There’s some kind of built-in trigger in the brain of every Penn student that kicks in whenever they meet an outsider, forcing them to explain the differences between where they go and Penn State.

“They’d be obnoxious enough without the copious amounts of cocaine, but when daddy’s paying what’s a couple of lines, right? Social Ivy, man!

“The pièce-de-résistance of Penn is its business school, Wharton, where your GPA improves the more achingly pre-professional you are. If you’re enrolled in a school where the logical conclusion of your course is Donald Trump, it’s probably time to reconsider your options.

“Penn displays all the hallmarks of an Ivy but with virtually none of the perks – sure, it’s got tons of rich kids, tons of internationals and tons of old-ass buildings, but when do you ever hear Penn uttered in the same breath as Harvard or Yale by anyone who didn’t go there?”

Princeton

“Blah blah second biggest order of beer from Anheuser-Busch every year, blah blah second only to the Indy 500. As they blather on about their huge alumni weekend and Tiger pride, it’s easy to wonder whether Princeton’s only fun once you’ve left.

“When they’re not having an internal meltdown about whether having a department named after America’s most Klan-friendly president is a good idea (it probably isn’t), they’re holing up in their eating clubs performing a sad tribute to a disappointing F Scott Fitzgerald novel.

“Princeton is the Miley Cyrus to Harvard and Yale’s Taylor and Nicki – they’re not world champions, they’re the attention-seeking undercard. Everything they do is in thrall of their more reputable rivals – when they beat Harvard and Yale in the same football season, they used to burn effigies of John Harvard and a bulldog. If Harvard and Yale beat Princeton – as both did, convincingly, this season – they sort of just get on with their lives.”

Yale

“It’s fine, I didn’t even want to go to Harvard. Yale has a much better drama program and the societies are far more diverse. New Haven also has a far more interesting scene. It’s ridiculous the way it’s denigrated as a dangerous town – I’ve never even been mugged. Some of my friends have, but that’s besides the point.

“So you can hear the fraught conversation coming out of the anxiety powder keg of Yale. A college known for squeezing out two Bushes and Skull and Bones, they’ve made their name this semester mainly by telling professors they aren’t allowed to speak. Maybe if they cared as much about overriding the Second Amendment as they did the First, there’d be fewer guns in New Haven and they’d find their campus a ‘safer space’.”

Compiled by Matt McDonald