My undergraduate degree is from Ohio State. About this I neither boast nor apologize, even though I knew when I was there that my education wasn't what I wanted it to be. That, I decided, is what a master's degree would be for. OSU was my stepping stone, my dues payment. When you were poor in Ohio, you went to Ohio State. They charged little for in-state tuition, and they practiced "open" admission; if you met the nominal entrance requirements, you got in. Period. (In my day, admission swelled to 60,000 students. They have since closed admission somewhat.) Your name, gender, race, income, and academic pedigree didn't matter. All were equal in the eyes of Ohio State, which is to say, all were dog meat.
The football team excepted—they never did anything to me—I hated OSU when I was there. The hate has abated over time, but it hasn't been supplanted by affection. It's simply where I did time. It's where I learned to manipulate an uncaring bureaucracy to my advantage, using its agents' worst tendencies against them. It's where I learned to build relationships with people who worked not in fancy offices, but in cubicles—I befriended the clerks and secretaries who actually work all day. And it's where I learned to bet on myself ultimately prevailing, to trust myself even during setbacks. Am I grateful? Hell no. Ohio State didn't set out to teach me survival skills. They set out to teach me about Chaucer and calculus, and in that they largely failed.
But.
If I hear one more Michigan alum sniff that his alma mater is "The Princeton of the Midwest," blood will surely flow. Michigan's a fine school, the second-best in the Big Ten after Northwestern, but let's not overstate things, hmmm? The latest perpetrator was Percy, who recently came out as a Wolverine, making all the cosmic tumblers of my universe suddenly click into place. Of course he's from Michigan. He could be from nowhere else. "It's the Harvard of the Big Ten, you know," he said. "Hard to get into."
"I thought it was the Stanford of the Midwest."
"That too."
"What about the University of Chicago? Northwestern? Notre Dame? Those are better rated, more exclusive Midwestern schools."
"Nope. Michigan."
And thus do I cheerfully present a reality check for any Michigan alumni still reading. The average SAT scores of incoming freshmen in 2004:
UW: 570/590
OSU: 580/580
Michigan: 620/660
UCLA: 620/660
Notre Dame: 670/690
Northwestern: 680/700
University of Chicago: 700/700
Stanford: 720/740
Harvard: 750/750
To summarize: Stanford and Harvard should sue for defamation.