User Reviews

"Ivory Tower" is very good and the best thing that I know of to date on this subject.

But. It is the tip of a Mount Everest of an iceberg. It is by no means exhaustive.

For example, "Ivory Tower" does not consider the alternative models of higher education that work elsewhere. This is an abysmal crack in the middle of this otherwise A+ contemporary piece of documentary investigative journalism.

For starters, why not consider the viable alternative models of higher education -- their traditions & place within their own indigenous cultures -- in Europe? And what the USA can learn from them? Europe is, after all, the taproot of US higher education. For at least a decade now there's been a wave of young Americans who come to Europe for affordable, excellent higher education. Reverse immigration -- is this not tragic? Why the myopia in "Ivory Tower" which suggests this crisis is only a US problem or only has a US solution? On one level this documentary is like the "World Series" in US baseball --which pretty much excludes the rest of the world.

That said, this is otherwise an excellent news piece about a deeply troubled, divided time in US Higher Education. There's almost a percolating Civil War. For "Ivory Tower" is also about the larger crisis in US social mobility. Plus suggests an institutional crisis in teachers' failure to deal with this problem in conjunction with their students -- since they together are the front line soldiers in this struggle.

The film's frustration is satisfying. It honestly exposes a problem that will not go away because of solutions proposed by the US government (local or national) or by the utopianism of digital technology.

The solution is somehow with The People -- as the Cooper Union segment ironically shows. Yet The People are oddly passive. Why? "Ivory Tower" is right. The USA's higher education system is either being deeply restructured to favor an economic elite or America is witnessing the destruction of the older, GI-Bill, democratic model of the dynamic engine of college education & social mobility.

Yet in "Ivory Tower" are the key fissures even identified? This is more of a cry, a frantic waving for help. And you can't tell if the troubled figure is waving or drowning.

What & where are the tools needed to fix US higher education? And "education" meaning what? Do Americans themselves fundamentally believe in intellectual education or practical training? Why is there such a profound lack of agreed-upon national levels for skills and knowledge? Why in effect are so many "nonprofit" universities dysfunctional, profit-making corporations? Why the blood-sucking banks living off of student loans and ex-students' careers ruined, stifled, threatened because of the student loan Sword of Damocles? Does this problem exist because, at heart, the USA is deeply anti-intellectual? Because other values rate higher? Like success or money or privilege and pleasure? What now? Thank you.

Ivory Tower is a comprehensive examination into the typically vast cost and perceived benefit from higher education in America and directed by Andrew Rossi.

As a good or service, higher education in the form of undergraduate studies' cost has grown significantly faster than inflation or any other comparable product. Filmmaker and documentarian Andrew Rossi analyzes the value added by a baccalaureate degree and the associated knowledge and experience gained through various individual case studies in Ivory Tower.

With one of the highest sticker prices of any country to attend college, American tuition has skyrocketed exponentially and significantly quicker than any other good. This is a fact and the tuition of the aughts is no longer remotely comparable to the tuition costs of even twenty to thirty years ago.

As a potential viewer of the film Ivory Tower, If you have thought that the university education system in the United States is flawed then you should enjoy this feature. As a documentary, Ivory Tower is extremely informative and covers the American upper education sector extensively. It does so by going into the historical events that significantly affected and resulted in how the American education system ended up in its current state when necessary but does not reflect the brunt of the film.

Primarily Andrew Rossi, director and writer of the documentary who gained his education from both Harvard and Yale either ironically or influentially, uses individual experiences and case studies as personal snap shots of the university experience to engage viewers. Of the inclusive archetypes, he touches base on: Harvard/the ivy league experience, Cooper Union/free education, state colleges via out of state students/aka party schools, -only colleges (women's and historically black), hacked education, public schools, community colleges, and Deep Springs College/super-specialty schools.

Further Rossi enlists esteemed Presidents and professors from the aforementioned schools and interviews them at length to get their opinions on the benefit versus the cost facing most American parents and prospective students. Further, he speaks with CEOs of companies that offer scholarships to those that drop out of colleges and authors of acclaimed novels that analyze his own hypothesis. The access Rossi gains to the colleges, students, complexes and experts is far-reaching and pretty unparalleled.

Ivory Tower is a film that stretches only 90minutes but the wide breadth of information is encyclopedic without being droning, dry or eye-glaze-over worthy. My only two complaints are that his direction is definitely skewed toward college not being worth the cost (overall), especially if it is the 'traditional' undergraduate experience. Additionally, his cinematography was very uninspired given his luck of being present during news-worthy affairs transpired at the schools he was filming and overall the film had a removed History-channel vibe.

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"Opportunity means making college more affordable." Barack Obama

If you want to know why the cost of higher education has spiraled out of control (over 1000% since the late '70's), then watch the informative but flawed documentary Ivory Tower because director Andrew Rossi doesn't have a clue either. Or rather, he has not yet put together cogent reasons (administrator salaries? faculty salaries? loans for new buildings?) or new solutions—he presents elements of each with no conclusions. The cost just is.

Rossi does show the costs are getting higher yet offers no solutions except the ones we already know: Deep Springs College in Death Valley is a free, all-male work-study institution and Spelman College for black women guarantees them a degree. However, the other 4000 institutions in our country are so diverse and complex that none of them is able to avoid the huge cost to students, even with generous financial aid.

Because the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates famously dropped out to form their colossal businesses, support organizations like Palo Alto's Thiel Fellowship will pay students the likes of $100K to "uncollege" and become entrepreneurs. All very good, but most of us do not have the genius of those great drop outs, or anywhere near it, to form significant businesses.

These are the strategies Rossi offers indirectly as his thesis for the future. Yet, the learning rate of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) is disappointingly low, and sizeable budgets at a variety of campuses have disappointed even progressives with lower than desired graduation levels.

The use of online technology promises relief from costs and a wider effect on the population. What Rossi fails to focus in on is the richness of the face to face experience, which to this former university professor and administrator is a major reason to get in debt: Never at any other time in most lives can students meet such diverse people and engage in such heady dialogue to introduce new ways of thinking and expression.

In that experience, we come down from our ivory towers to engage the real world. We can't achieve that by staying away:

"There are a lot of ideas being floated to get these problems under control: value report cards for universities; pay-it-forward tuition plans; a renewed focus on non-collegiate higher education. For now, however, tuitions continue to rise and students continue to take on back-breaking debt to cover the bills." Bruce Watson

"Ivory Tower" is an informative documentary of how higher education has been robbing students and their parents with the rising cost of tuition and fees over the years. This documentary is going to show how colleges are leaving students with debt they can barely afford for an education that might not land them the perfect high paying job they wanted as well. It's amazing how some of these big colleges are becoming more like resorts than places of education and that's some of the extra things the students are paying for. What makes this worse is the fact the students will be more interested in socializing and partying than getting the education they're blowing their parents money on. They're actually paying for things that really have nothing to do with a good education. After seeing this film you'll be wondering is it worth it to go to or send your kids to college now. This documentary does have a flaw or two but cinematic perfection isn't really the main point of this film. This film is to let people know what they are going to be dealing with before they enter college themselves or send someone to college.

Like a lot of kids graduating from high school I was "brainwashed" into thinking a college education was the end all or be all to success. I ultimately found the education I received was severely lacking in giving students the necessary tools and skills needed to survive in the real world.

While this documentary wasn't perfect it did point out the absurd amount of debt kids unfortunately have to take on to graduate. In my opinion the whole college program needs to be seriously overhauled.

As I said I didn't find this documentary perfect but at least it brought some of this stuff to light

When I was a high school teacher, one of the more controversial things I did was to encourage my students NOT to go to college like so many of their peers. Instead, I encouraged them to work or go to trade school. Why? Because college, for most young people, is not a great investment any more. You often don't get more out of college than life without it...particularly in regard to prospective job earnings and college. For example, if a student takes on $100,000-200,000 in debt, they might never be able to pay it off...whereas a student learning welding or plumbing or accounting might live a very happy life with little, if any, debt. And, many kids who could barely complete high school were being pushed straight into college...and they almost always failed. Needless to say, many parents weren't happy with me telling their kids that there were alternatives to college. When I and other parents were undergraduates, college was affordable...you could work summers to pay for upcoming two semesters. However, today this simply isn't possible for most kids...and this film dares to say it.

"Ivory Tower" is a very good documentary. It shows many different sides and allows the people to talk. A few seemed completely off-base, such as those who insanely think the system is not broken or those who demand free university education...as someone must pay for it. But many didn't seem weird and offered alternatives...such as non-traditional colleges and the students in the commune, of sorts, in San Francisco where prospective students don't do college but live together and teach each other how to be entrepreneurs. I liked these alternative voices and think the film would be fantastic for teens and their parents to watch together. After all, they'll soon have to make a decision...one which can be very costly./

I know a lot about this subject because I've written a few papers on the issue of student loan debt... this movie taught me absolutely nothing I didn't already know, and like others have stated, offers no solutions for solving this problem (which are pretty clear-cut, by the way). This documentary had very little direction, wasn't particularly engaging, and didn't really serve much of a purpose. And it also made no mention of the model other countries use to fund higher education, which was pretty surprising. My advice: skip the documentary and do your own research. You'll learn a lot more that way, and probably in less than 90 minutes.

90 minutes of children whining "SOMEONE ELSE SHOULD PAY FOR MY LIFE". A pathetic, disjointed, chaotic mess. An 8th grader with an iPhone could make a better movie. Watching students stage a sit-in because the college threatens to make them pay tuition for the first time (EGAD THE HORROR) is the essence of first-world infantilized narcissism. There is no narrative to the film, no beginning-middle-end. It's as if the director passed around a camera and asked everybody to "talk about education stuff for 5 minutes". At best, it's a (horrible) campaign commercial for Elizabeth Warren, as is the website. There is no 'there' there. A convoluted and inept political hack job. Save your $15.