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Coulter and Olbermann Giving Big Red a Bad Name

Ann Coulter and Keith Olbermann are in the midst of an inane catfight about who got the better Cornell education. Coulter wrote on Wednesday that:

Keith didn't go to the Ivy League Cornell; he went to the Old MacDonald Cornell. The real Cornell, the School of Arts and Sciences (average SAT: 1,325; acceptance rate: 1 in 6 applicants), is the only Ivy League school at Cornell. ... Keith went to an affiliated state college at Cornell, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (average SAT: about that of pulling guards at the University of South Carolina; acceptance rate: 1 of every 1.01 applicants).

As a fellow Cornell grad (something I say without much pride in this particular instance, because they're both acting like buffoons), I feel the urge to jump in with some fact checking.

For starters, Coulter's numbers are off. As Olbermann countered on his show, the latest data from Cornell is that the acceptance rate for the Ag college is one in five—the same as for A&S. More ridiculous is Coulter's claim that only the College of Arts & Sciences is part of the Ivy League. The connotations of the phrase "Ivy League" are as numerous as the popped collars adorning their campuses, but the literal meaning is a sports conference, like the Big 10. Not only are Aggies like Olbermann just as welcome on the Cornell fields as Coulter's cohorts, but they were actually better represented on the 2008 football team (44 Aggies, 38 Arts), according to Cornell's Director of Athletics Communications Jeremy Hartigan.

Olbermann's not taking the high road, though. In his condescending response, he emphasizes that if "poor Annie" was from outside New York (she is—Connecticut), she "probably paid 8 to 10 times" for her Cornell diploma what he did for his. That's true, but it has nothing to do with which college within Cornell she attended. Since only New York state residents get the tuition break for the "contract colleges" like Olbermann's (they're not technically "state" colleges, as Coulter called them), she would have paid more than Olbermann no matter what.