[kennyc]

What Ivy League students are reading that you aren’t

If you want an Ivy League education, you could fork over $200 grand or so and go to Cornell or Harvard for four years. Alternatively, you could save a ton of cash by simply reading the same books Ivy League students are assigned.

That became easier recently with the release of the Open Syllabus Explorer, an online database of books assigned in over 1 million college courses over the past decade or so.

As the group behind the project explains: There's an "intellectual judgment embedded" in the lists of books college students are required to read. The most frequently-assigned books at the nation's universities are essentially our canon: the body of literature that society's leaders are expected to be familiar with. So what does that canon look like?

For starters, the Explorer lets us filter by individual schools. I tallied the most frequently assigned books at all U.S. colleges and universities and compared them to the list at seven Ivy League schools — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, U. Penn and Brown (Dartmouth doesn't seem to appear in the Explorer's database — more on that below).
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