Harvard Pranks Yale With Hilarious Fake Admissions Tour

Those Ivy League scamps sure know how to have a good time...obsessing over each other. Enjoy.
 
This from Susan Adams at Forbes:

Yale motto: "Luxury is truth."

After dragging my 16-year-old on 15 college tours since last spring, I was in need of comic relief when my son sent me a link to a Business Insider piece that ran yesterday, showing a hilarious prank played by a Harvard comedy group called On Harvard Time, which produces videos it posts on YouTube. The Harvard kids buy Yale sweatshirts and then march onto the Yale campus where they pose as tour guides.

It’s not clear how they do this without the notice of the Yale admissions staff, but in the video, they attract a group of a half dozen prospective students and their parents and then proceed to give a Spiel that makes Yale sound far inferior to Harvard. “Yale is in many ways Harvard’s little, perhaps less successful sister,”  says one fake guide, who goes on to make fun of the excessive amount of Gothic architecture on campus and the Skull and Bones society. “Yale students are stupider than Harvard students, Yale students are not as successful as Harvard students, Yale students are not as attractive as Harvard students,” he says, while the touring families look on, weirdly unfazed.

The video made me laugh but also cringe, thinking of how numb these tours make you and how the perky guides all start to sound alike after the first couple of tours (“We believe in a holistic approach to admissions. You can take Statistics to satisfy the math distribution requirement.”)
Even though I’ve told my son that he shouldn’t pay undue attention to college rankings, even including the Forbes list, he can’t stop himself, which is why I especially liked a moment in the video when the guide says that Yale’s U.S. News ranking fluctuates from between “three and fifteen.” For the record, at Forbes we rank Yale at No. 4 this year, four slots ahead of Harvard at No. 8.