Parents love to brag about how their kids are going to one of the Ivy League schools. The myth is that those “prestige” schools guarantee a superior education and put their grads on the path to success.

Is it true? After reading the new book Slacking, you’ll have your doubts. I review it for the Martin Center today. Authors Adam Kissel, Madison Marino Doan, and Rachel Alexander Cambre have gone through the courses on offer at all eight of the Ivies and conclude that it’s easy for students to get their credits largely by taking fluff courses or ones where the right answer is the professor’s ideology.

For example, the writing courses at the Ivies are often exercises in leftism more than in correct sentences and paragraphs. Here’s a course at Yale: “Black and Indigenous Ecologies,” in which students “engage with anti-colonial and anti-racist attempts to imagine the earth no longer made in the ecocidal image of imperialist Western man.”

Except for Brown with its completely open curriculum, Ivy League students work in a “distribution requirements” system in which they must take a few courses in each of several broad categories. That is supposed to give them a broad education. But there are so many narrow, trendy courses that satisfy the requirements that students can get their degrees with lots of useless classes. At Princeton, students can satisfy the Literature and the Arts requirement with “The Political Lives of Angela Davis” or “Climate Storytelling for Climate Action.”

No, the Ivy League is not all it’s cracked up to be.