The Bigger Problem With Brown And The Ivies

I found the video embedded above in my YouTube feed this morning. While it doesn't specifically note the circumstances, it appears to be the testimony of Alex Shieh. a former Brown undergraduate, before a House Judiciary subcommittee last June regarding rising tuition costs and institutional bloat at Brown. One of the first points he made has been borne out since the 1960s by Ferdinand Lundberg, Alan Dershowitz, and Jerome Karabel:

I'm a legacy student at Brown. I went to a prep school that feeds to the Ivy League. My parents are doctors who can afford the $93,000 a year sticker price. In other words, I'm exactly who the Ivy League was built for. . . . According to The New York Times, the median student's family makes over $200,000 a year. Half the student body comes from the top 5% of earners.

Shieh appears to have dropped out of Brown since his testimony to form a corporate startup, and not long before his testimony, he barely avoided disciplinary action there:

“Elite academia is in crisis because of a refusal to accommodate ordinary Americans and an unaccountable class of bureaucrats who treat universities as corporate brands rather than institutions of learning,” Shieh told Fox News Digital in a statement. “I think we need to rethink what it means to be elite. Today, elite schools are elitist. I’m fighting for them to be elite in a meritocratic sense, where they are filled with the best and the brightest, not the richest and most well-connected.”

Shieh, a rising junior who was cleared of wrongdoing by the university on May 14, 2025, had previously angered school officials by sending a DOGE-like email to non-faculty employees identifying himself as a journalist for The Brown Spectator and asking them what they do all day to try to determine why the school’s tuition has gotten so expensive.

This is precisely the problem I had at Dartmouth in the 1960s: I couldn't understand why my schoolmates were so ordinary, when we'd been told we were the crème de la crème. It's taken me the rest of my life to find at least partial answers to that question -- I was a public school kid from the northeastern suburbs who'd gotten in on SATs, grades, and extracurriculars, when as a practical matter, the pool of those admitted from that group is something like 20% of any incoming class.

The other 80% are primarily athletes; legacies; preppies; wealthy foreign students; children of clebrities, politicians, and major donors; and DEI. What makes them special is their parents' power and money; they don't have to be smart. By all indications, one of the two students killed at Brown last week, Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, born in Uzbekistan but a naturalized US citizen after immigrating with his parents, a scholarship student and aspiring neurosurgeon, a public school applicant from suburban Virginia, appears to have been one of the fairly small number admitted on merit.

On the other hand, althogh the other student killed, Ella Cook, went to public school, she lived in Mountain Brook, AL, where the median household income is $191,128, and she was Episcopalian; apparently she wasn't a scholarship student. She was noted as being fluent in French, so I was curious how she learned it so well. According to Chrome AI mode,

Cook had a love for traveling "anywhere — especially where French is spoken". She also worked one summer as a program assistant at an organization that runs summer study programs at universities around the world, which likely provided additional language immersion exposure.

This suggests she had the wherewithal and contacts for frequent foreign travel, which again suggests she wasn't admitted to Brown in the same applicant pool as Umurzokov.

What continues to intrigue me is the two cases that have come to light who somehow didn't make it through the Brown/Ivy program, "John", the former Brown student who is now homeless and lived in the basement of Barus & Holley, and Alex Shieh. Shieh appears to have dropped out in frustration, calling Brown a "fraud" and a "racket".

What continues to puzzle me about "John", whatever the cause of his homelessness, is that he was capable of insightful observation, noticing that something was significantly out of kilter with Claudio Neves Valente, and he was then able to follow through conscientiously enough to track him through the neighborhood, note significant features of his car, and even investigate it carefully enough to discover it had a false license plate.

It's impoprtant to recognize as well that Neves Valente was armed and definitely capable of shooting, which is something "John" must have instinctively recognized about him -- yet he persisted to the point of accosting him to ask what he was up to. Then he reported what he'd found on line and on the tip line, making, in the words of the state attorney general, a remarkably persuasive and articulate case.

Here's my question, and I put it especially to Ivy alumni in particular: how many of your schoolmates, especially those who've gone on to successful careers based on their Ivy credentials, would be capable of doing what "John" did? At this point., in my estimate, I would put that number as not much more than one, "John" himself. No matter what personal qualities may have brought him to homelessness, it strikes me that his combination of high intelligence, ability to read people, abiity to draw important inferences, initiative, fortitude, and communucation skills are something like a putative best possible outcome for an Ivy education. So why isn't he already one of the most prominent Brown alumni? Instead, he's homeless.

It really sounds to me as thougn some corporate mover and shaker, maybe even a member of Brown's Board of Fellows, should take "John" in and give him a very, very close look. The personal qualities we've seen from this guy suggest to me that Brown had some very high-quality material to work with, but it managed to botch the job. How did this happen?

The same applies to Alex Shieh. He's asking obvious questions. Why on earth does Brown cost $93,000 a year, and even students on scholarship can't afford it? This isn't much different from commentators now asking how Brown President Christina H. Paxson makes $3 million a year, when the university was comically unable to protect its students from last week's shooting.

The answers to any questions like this will all involve Alex Shieh's insight: "I'm exactly who the Ivy League was built for." The Ivy League was definitely not built for "John".