Is Vanderbilt Beating Ivy League Schools at Their Own Game?

Today on CityCast Nashville, Vanderbilt University is no longer the Harvard of the South. It might be gaining on the Harvard of the North, too. Journalist Clara Suteth joins us to dig into her viral New York magazine article explaining Vandy's northward expansion and how her alma mater has bested the ivies. It's Wednesday, August 5th, tomorrow's election day. I'm your host, Rachel Yakovone, and this is what Nashville's talking about. Before we get into today's show, I want to let y'all know about some limited run CityCast Nashville swag. As your new host, they're sending me one of these cheerful yellow Nashville pennants that say, I live here on purpose. Perfect to hang up with my favorite sports teams ones above my bookcase. And they're available only for our neighbors. That's those folks who become a member at $10 a month or $100 a year. You'll get this plus extended episodes and members-only events when you go to membership.citycast.fm slash Nashville. Snag your pennant now and we can match. And now on with the show. What's one thing from your time in Nashville that you wish you still had in NYC? Oh my gosh. Fido, the coffee shop, which I think is closing. Yeah. Because I follow them on social media. Yes. I love Bongo Java and Fido so much that when the pandemic happened, I started buying their beans in bulk and having them shipped to me to help them. That's one of the pandemic practices that I have kept up. I still get it shipped to me in New York because I love them so much. I understand that. And that's a big praise coming from someone in New York with a lot of coffee shops around you now. But I wanted to mention, of course, your article was in New York Magazine. For those who have not gotten a chance to read it yet, the TLDR is that Vandy is now competing with the Kay Ivey's. So what exactly do you mean by that and how did that happen? The story of the article, which is kind of a 20-year arc of Vanderbilt, rising in sort of the esteem of people outside of Nashville and the South, I think how they are competing with the Kay Ivey's is the fact that the same students that apply to Kay Ivey's and get in and then ultimately go are also applying, getting in, and going to Vanderbilt. So, you know, I did well in school. I went to Vanderbilt 20 years ago. I did well. I had good grades. I was not going to get into Harvard. But now, I wonder, could I even get into Vanderbilt now? Because the level of student academically what they're achieving before they even get there is so much higher than when I was there. And they're as hard to get into as I think Yale was last year and some of the smaller ivies are pretty much year after year. They're at that level. And 20 years ago, they were a very, very good school. It's not like they came out of nowhere.

But they were sort of like one tier down and they have slowly over time clawed their way to the top to be where, I think if you had asked Vanderbilt, you know, 20 years ago, that's what they wanted to achieve and what they felt like they could achieve and what they kind of deserved. And they just were not taken seriously for a long time, I think, largely because of location. You're talking about the academic rigor, but there's also the cultural aspect. You were there, I would say, as the honky talks were getting maybe their revival and they're very different now. You've got this like vibrant arts and culture community. I am saying this as someone who just moved back to Nashville from New Haven. And Yale was kind of quiet by comparison. Can you talk about the cultural aspect of Vanderbilt over these years too? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think. Before I get to Vandy specifically, I think Nashville for a long time was this like best kept secret in America. So I grew up in Chicago and I told my friends that I was going to school in Nashville. They were like, oh, okay, why? And then I got there and I was like, oh my gosh, Nashville has all of this live music. I don't, I like country music fine, but it's not. the thing that I gravitate towards, but there were all of these just great bands. And local, you know, before buy local and eat local was really a thing, you could do that very easily in Nashville because everything was sort of locally owned. There were all these great, like I said, coffee shops, but even just like grocery stores, food co-ops, restaurants and stuff. And now it is not a best kept secret. I think everyone has sort of figured this out. But as Nashville has become really popular, then... Vanderbilt has benefited from that because Vandy always had a great, vibrant cultural scene. They've got the sports. They've got music because they've Blair. You know, they have STEM. They have, I was in creative writing major. They have art history, all of that sort of stuff. You're sort of classic liberal arts education. And then they're within Nashville. And you can't get that at a lot of places. I mean, even, you know, I did grow up in Chicago and I took classes at Northwestern when I was in high school. And Northwestern is in a suburb of Chicago called Evanston, which is pretty vibrant. But it's not the same as like living in the heart of a city, which is Nashville. So you kind of have the best of everything when you go there. Going to an Kay Ivey League school means you get that certain level of esteem after graduation. But does a Vanderbilt degree confer that same level of status? I think it does. You know, I think the secret that I learned, I will say that I did not go into academia, but I did go to grad school. I went to Columbia. So it's technically, you know, Kay Ivey League for grad school. And then, you know, I got jobs after that. And the secret that I learned is that... employers don't necessarily care exactly where you went to school as long as when you've graduated from college in a place that they have heard of. And then above that, then there's like a little bit of a ranking. You know, if you went to Harvard and they see that on your resume, they're going to be like, oh, wow, you went to Harvard. But once you get to a certain level, whether or not you went to Vanderbilt or Dartmouth or Northwestern or MIT, it's all kind of the same. And I think that was the case.

20 years ago, certainly in the South, because people had heard of Vanderbilt. The issue was when I went to New York, people had not heard of it. So people who had heard of it were impressed. And the people who hadn't just kind of like looked at me with pity and wondered where I went to school. That's not the case anymore. Like I just earlier today met someone and we were talking because her daughter is going to college in a few weeks. And so we're talking about colleges and she asked me, you know, where I went and I said Vanderbilt. And she said, oh, wow, which is not the response that I normally would get in New York. You know, whatever region that you live in, if you go to school outside of that region, unless it's a major, major university, people tend not to know what it is. But now people recognize Vanderbilt. And I think that does help a lot. I talked to a recent graduate who said he has found that when he applies for jobs, people comment on where he went to college. And he didn't necessarily expect that. So, you know, I think it depends on the place and where you're applying. But yeah, it definitely makes a difference.

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Yeah, I mean, speaking of New York, that's kind of the newspeg of your whole piece is now Vanderbilt is expanding to New York City. What do you think makes New York an appealing place to expand to for them? I think the one thing that was sort of a detractor for the location of being in Nashville was that it's a little far flung from other major cities. I mean, you have Atlanta, but other than that. L.A. is very far away. Chicago is a nine-hour drive. New York is far away. And if you were a college student wanting to go into, let's say, business or finance or something like that, you would have to go to New York, perhaps, for an internship. And that can be difficult. It's far away. Do you know anyone? It's very expensive. And Vanderbilt now by getting sort of a foothold in New York City. And for undergraduates, they can go for a semester. You know, what is that? Like three and a half months? They take a few classes. And they also interned somewhere. And so they get to live on campus in New York. They don't have to worry about housing. They're somewhat insulated from New York City, especially the location where Vanderbilt is, is very safe. But they're somewhat insulated from... You know, if you were to think of New York as like a scary place, if you weren't from there ahead and visited there, you might feel a little bit better that your kid, your 20-year-old kid is going there for three months if they're living on Vanderbilt's campus. But they still get to experience all that New York life and go out and do things and meet people. And then they can kind of decide if that's for them or not. So maybe they would want to move there after college or maybe they wouldn't. When I was doing the story, Vanderbilt made a big point to tell me that their largest alumni network is in New York City, which I did not know, actually, even though I live there. I'm not very active in the alumni network, but they said they have like 9,000 graduates who are somewhere in the New York City region. And so then you can kind of get plugged in that way as well. Vandy also has a couple other satellite campuses. There's San Francisco and also like soon to be Palm Beach. Is what Vandy's doing actually unique compared to the Kay Ivey's? Well, you know, Harvard doesn't need a satellite campus. And in some ways, they kind of don't want one because. If your whole thing is being the best of the best and being very selective, you don't really need to branch out and try to get more people to come to you. They will come to you, essentially. Other schools, I'll get to Vanderbilt in a second, but the school that's like most famous for these satellite campuses is Northeastern, and they use them in a different way. You can apply to Northeastern.

go to a satellite campus maybe for one year and then transfer to the main school. And it's a way to get into the school if maybe you don't have the credentials to get in to the main school, the traditional route, you know, right out of high school. And it also helps them seem more selective. Like it helps with the rankings where they can say, oh, we only accept. you know, however many percentage of applications because all these people apply to our main school and we say, no, you can't come here, but you could go to this other place. Plus you get tuition money, which is helpful. Vanderbilt's so far, they're not doing that. Who's to say if they down the line change their mind? But the New York one is very specifically like this study abroad in New York semester. They haven't finalized their plans for their one in. San Francisco, I think it will be a little bit different because the idea with that one is that all of the students that would be interested in AI, computer science, STEM type stuff, would go there. Not all of them, but like it would be a place that you could go and you could take classes and then probably also intern for the Googles of the world and everything like that. But only doing that for one semester. I think when you're studying something like computer science is perhaps not that helpful. So they said that they were toying with the idea of having it be a little bit of a longer program. I don't know if it would be all four years people going there or not. I don't think they know yet. Then the Chattanooga one is specifically for quantum computing. That is still in the works. Like it's being built. It's not. there yet. And then I think the one in Florida in West Palm Beach might be something kind of similar to the New York one, where you go for a little while, take some classes, intern, and then go. So in some ways, it's more of like a career boost for their students rather than a way to sort of become more selective. It just seems to me like their approach is a little bit different. I don't know if they're ever going to have. I think Northeastern has. I don't know the number off the top of my head, but close to a dozen maybe satellite campuses. I don't think Vanderbilt's ever going to get quite to that number. I want to talk to you a little bit about recruitment comes up a lot in your piece. And part of that, especially in recent years, has been not just with racial groups, but with religious groups. The former chancellor told you about the Jewish Student Center and like kosher dining options that came to be in his tenure. But many would point to more recent years, the treatment of pro-Palestinian protesters on campus. Vandy was the only school of its caliber to arrest some students and actually a local journalist. The university prides itself on its political neutrality, and you get into that a bit, but do you feel that it's really neutral? You know, I think that it is trying its hardest. I mean, journalists in some ways have the same problem where you're supposed to come to a story, free of all biases.

portray both sides and let the readers or listeners decide. And that's almost impossible. You know, once you do reporting or once you talk to a bunch of people, you're probably going to come up with a conclusion. And sometimes both sides are not equal. That's not the case here. But what I'm saying is there's like a gold standard of neutrality that Vanderbilt I do think is really trying to achieve in certain instances. I'm not sure that they have succeeded. But I think most importantly is when I talk to students, because really it matters if students feel like the university is treating everyone the same or is neutral. And most of the students, not all, but most of the students that I talked to kind of told me they weren't really buying it. They felt like when it behooved the university, it was... taking this neutral stance, and then in other instances, it wasn't. And also, sometimes being neutral means not taking any action and not taking any action sometimes does seem to people like you're picking a side. Could the perception from students impact recruitment, do you think, especially as we're considering those kind of satellite campuses that they're also doing? Well, you know, it's interesting. So I live in New York. I am not Jewish, but I have a lot of Jewish friends and colleagues. And one of the things that I was told by just people in my life was that Jewish families are very interested in Vanderbilt right now because of the way that it handled the protests. They feel like other universities. were endangering Jewish students or were not taking appropriate steps in their view to quash what they considered to be anti-Semitism. And they liked what Vanderbilt did. And also when I talked to college administrators, they said the same thing, like their Jewish clients and also more conservative clients. liked what they saw from Vanderbilt. I have not personally talked to someone who sort of is on the other side of that, is either, you know, has family from Palestine or feels very strongly about the situation Gaza that they were not going to apply to Vanderbilt because of that. I'm sure those people exist. I just haven't talked to them. But I will say that everyone that I talk to seems to feel as if. the boost among Jewish families both sort of outweigh anyone who looked at what happened and decided not to apply there. I also think, you know, Outside of Nashville, Vanderbilt's Gaza protests weren't in the national news. And so it's very possible that people aren't aware when they're applying what had happened. You know, unless you are very interested in this and are looking at this particularly, especially because a lot of this was like 24 now, that as the years go on, I think it'll sort of fall back in people's minds of how anyone's school.

handled this probably with the exception of Columbia. And it's hard to say, like even Vanderbilt when I asked them, I said, I'm hearing this from. college consultants and also just people that I know that more families who are Jewish are applying to Vanderbilt. And even Vanderbilt was like, yeah, we've heard that anecdotally. We don't really necessarily know if that's going to play out in the numbers because the number of people who are applying to Vanderbilt has risen consistently every single year for the past 20 years. So who's to say if there's another boost, how much of that is because of the protests and how much of that is just trajectory. It does feel like even as we're talking about maybe this is more of the controversy recently. Like everything has been looking up for Vanderbilt in recent years, including their football team. If this continues, is there a chance that Vanderbilt gets welcomed into the ivies instead of the SEC? I don't think so because, you know, an Kay Ivey League school, all that is is really a athletic league. And... I don't think Vanderbilt even wants to be in the Kay Ivey League in the sense of athletics. First of all, the SEC is kind of the Kay Ivey League of Athletics. So if you can be in the SEC but also academically be in the ivies, you kind of like have the best of both worlds. I was at Columbia for graduate school. And so it's just graduate school. It wasn't college. But they do have a football team. I don't know where they played or practiced. And I don't know anyone who followed them or paid attention. It certainly was not a major part of campus culture. Whereas at Vanderbilt, you know, especially now that they're good, it really is. I mean, going to the football games is a big part of undergraduate life and also basketball. I ruin my March Madness brackets every year that they're in the tournament because I put them in number one and they don't win. But that doesn't happen very often for Kay Ivey League schools. You start the whole piece by referencing the Kappa Alpha canon, which for most of its existence pointed toward the north. If you had a cannon outside of your house, what would you point it at? Oh my gosh. Well, first of all, I probably would not have a cannon outside my house. For many reasons, I have two little children, so I'll just blame them, but I probably wouldn't anyway. I don't think I would point it at anything in particular. You know, the thing with the K.A. Canon was that it was all tongue-in-cheek, right? I mean, the canon was non-functional. It was never going to actually go off, largely because different K.A. chapters at different universities in the past had accidentally set off their canon. I think in the 70s, someone was killed. So most of the time it's just property damage, but it's a fraternity policy now that if you do have one, you can't, it can't be operational. But they were pointing it at the north as sort of this like tongue-in-cheek, ha-ha, this is so funny type of thing. And that's fine, I suppose. I don't know. It depends on how you view this sort of stuff. I don't think I would point it at anything in particular. Maybe there was a downstairs neighbor that we didn't really like, so maybe we would point it at him.

That's an incredibly New York answer. Well, thank you so much, Claire. I hope people will take the time and read through your piece here that goes through those 20 years. But thank you for summarizing as much as we could here today. Yeah, well, thank you. That's all for today on CityCast Nashville. Don't forget to vote tomorrow for the state and federal primary election and municipal general. Go vote. And if you want to support this show and get great perks, become a CityCast Nashville neighbor today at membership.citycast.fm. If you enjoyed the show, why not tell your friends? Rate the show, leave us a review and subscribe to our CityCast Nashville newsletter. We'll be back tomorrow morning with more news from around the city. I'll leave you with some Puerto Rican encouragement. Balante.