23rd
The NYTimes article talks about Ivy league schools as the breeding ground for Wall Street automatons (myself somewhat close to being among them) rather than public sector workers for the public good. Obama (this guy’s everywhere these days!) said it “betrays a poverty of ambition.” I think he has it wrong. Maybe a poverty of creativity. The one thing most Harvard students have is ambition, it’s a big reason they got into Harvard, but it’s often an ambition towards this notion of success, which Harvard arguably epitomizes. The notion of success as defined by our society is bogus (as evidenced by holding hack, entry level big bank employees as the epitome of immediate post-collegiate success). That Ivy league schools have not been able to effectively debunk this narrow notion of success is evidence of these schools’ poverty of creativity.
