> My understanding is that the definition of "Ivy league
> college" actually refers to what colleges play sports
> against what other colleges.
According to Wikipedia:
The use of the phrase is no longer limited to athletics,
and now represents an educational philosophy inherent to
the nation's oldest schools.
> I don't know anyone who doesn't work a service job
> who is really into sports.
There are downsides to the polar opposite though. Personally, I think the balance is to love playing sports (or possibly going to friends' sporting events to cheer them on), rather than to just love watching them.
> But this goes back to my own prejudice against
> liberal arts majors.
I think you're missing the distinction between someone that pursues are major because they want to coast through university vs someone that pursues a major because they have a passion of the subject.
>I think you're missing the distinction between someone that pursues are major because they want to coast through university vs someone that pursues a major because they have a passion of the subject.
I don't think passion has as much to do with it as you seem to think. I mean, sure, to be great, passion is required. But passion alone is not sufficient. You also need great skill to be great.
The problem with going into entertainment (and I'd class both art and sports as entertainment.) is that the way the economy currently works, sure, a great artist produces a lot of value. But a mediocre artist? A mediocre artist produces coffee.
Engineering,[1] on the other hand? or accounting? or, really, most other professions? Sure, the mediocre are worlds away from the great, but they still produce a reasonable amount of positive value.
My point is just that if you spend four (or six or eight) years of your life training to do something outside of entertainment, you have a pretty good chance of being able to produce a reasonable, if not great amount of value when you finish. More value than you could produce before you began the training, at any rate. If you study entertainment, on the other hand? you have an extremely small chance of producing a huge amount of value, but most likely you will not be capable of producing more value after you leave school than when you entered school.
So yeah, that's why I'm saying a degree in the arts implies a life of leisure; it implies that you have the resources to spend years training for a job that will not be able to support you when you finish.
I mean, as far as luxury goods go, it's pretty cool; I certainly find someone who spent a few years studying history to be quite a bit more interesting than someone who, say, has a really expensive car. But, for those of us without rich parents? in the end, we need to work for a living. School loans can't be discharged by bankruptcy.
[1]I think compensation for Engineers is the opposite of compensation for artists; Really great Engineers, unless they also act as businesspeople, don't earn a very large multiplier on what a mediocre Engineer earns. I mean, we're talking maybe 3x, when you account for location disparity. I personally think this is a market inefficiency; I believe a really great engineer produces hundreds, if not thousands of times as much value as a mediocre Engineer. That disparity of pay between the average and the great, though, actually exists in the entertainment world. The great artists make huge sums, while the average artist gets paid unskilled labor rates.
It's interesting, 'cause this might actually explain the Engineering market inefficiency.
The thing is, when you start your training, you don't actually know if you can become great, and I don't think you'd have many people going through the training to be Engineers if the average Engineer made day labor rates, even if the pay for the top people was so high as to make the total expected return similar to what it is today. Looking at it from that perspective, it's not a market failure, it's Engineering students trading off upside for a improved average case.
