Yalies envious of our Spring Fling lineup

From the Yale Daily News:

The YCC was given $140,000 dollars for Spring Fling; Wesleyan was given $56,000 for theirs. But Wesleyan is getting a lot more with their dirty liberal arts dollar. Instead of trying to check a whole lot of boxes – like our mix of pop-punk bullshit (Jimmy Eat World), legitimate hip-hop (The Roots), and unattractive/untalented crooning (Sean Kingston) – Wesleyan assembled a line-up, that while not homogenous, works harmoniously together.

Zachary Fuhrer, the writer of the article, also provides a spot-on characterization of Jimmy Eat World:

Now, if I were in 7th grade again, and had a lifetime supply of white and black sweat bands and Dep hair gel, I might be down with Jimmy Eat World playing at Spring Fling. But even Jimmy Eat World fans didn’t listen to any song other than “The Middle.”

Well, I dunno... "Sweetness" was at least decent...

Ex-Student Defrauds Yale

Akash Maharaj, a 26-year-old New Yorker by way of Trinidad and Tobago, faked his way into Yale with phony transcripts and a distorted identity, and received a full year's scholarship for $47,000, only to get busted when his Yale ex-boyfriend, who had been threatened by Maharaj in the weeks since they broke up, reported him to school authorities who investigated his background.

Yale is PISSED. You can't make this stuff up! Ok never mind, this guy clearly did.

If you're feeling extra seedy, Gawker.com dug up as much as they possibly could about the story.

Hartford Courant: Ex-Student Dupes Yale

Ivy League Discounts- Making It Tougher for the Rest of Us?

You might be aware that last month Harvard radically changed its financial aid policy to greatly benefit students from families with annual incomes of up to $180,000 as well as financially less well-off ones. Not to be outdone, last week Yale announced that it will do the same for students whose families earn up to $200,000. Dartmouth is the latest college to announce a major overhaul: a new plan revealed this week provides completely free tuition to all students from families with less than $75,000 in annual income, replaces all loans with scholarships, and extends need-blind admission to international students.

So what's next from less uh, well-endowed schools? Harvard has a $35 billion endowment, Yale stands at $22.5 billion, Dartmouth has a little over $3 billion, and all three have high growth rates. Clearly their new financial aid policies are excellent news for students accepted there, but what kind of precedent are they setting for the rest of the country? Besides the Ivy league and gigantic state universities, you won't find many schools with this much to spend, and there's little chance of Wesleyan (and other smaller schools) scrounging up enough billions of dollars to completely bail out students who could use a break on their tuition. It's nice that schools like Wes are dropping loans for the lower income range, but there are inevitably many students who are going to end up dealing with a lot of debt after graduation. Does this guy have a valid argument in his New York Times Op-Ed about how Ivy League discounts put stress on less well-endowed schools to skew financial aid so it benefits wealthier students at the expense of poorer ones? Can SuperRoth help us out here by the time he's done? Only time will tell.