Well, I don't have current knowledge of Old Nassau, so you may (possibly) be correct.
But when "Obama" was going to HLS, Michelle Robinson was in fact a student at Princeton. Have you read the document which purports to be her senior thesis?
If you have done so, and if you believe Princeton graded blacks on a curve when she was there, you are out of your flippin' mind.
During my sojurn in various Halls, mostly vegetation covered, the lowest effective grade for an African-American student was B- ("F" equivalent). The norm was "A". Everyone who passed through that system knows this.
Perhaps it has changed, I don't know. Based on the performance we see in the White House, I doubt it.
There are ... different curves ...
diversity must be preserved. It has been this way since at least the 70’s. An Ivy admission officer flat out told me I was not the right color or socioeconomic class for admission. That was the day the US Air Force gained a new officer candidate.
In my experience, both you and the poster with the hard-working Ivy kids are correct. Even when I was in college in the 1970s (our freshmen had the same mean SATs as Ivies), there were two unofficial tracks: regular and affirmative-action. The regular students took tough courses, especially the pre-meds and future-lawyer types, and basically worked all the time.
Affirmative-action cases, some of whom were ghetto refugees with criminal records, took the Black Studies and Lefty political courses, and spent a lot of time in the cars owned by the Student Activities office. I should mention that many other black students were on the regular track, having come from middle-class families and been to elite high schools; they worked their tails off with everyone else. But the other track was there. I should add that, for the non-affirmative-action students, if you were determined to be a real party-boy, you could take easy courses and survive. But you would wind up with Cs and still have to work your butt off sometimes.
The question in college was, and probably still is, how much self-respect you need in order to go to sleep at night. In Michelle and Barry's case, I'd guess not much. Yes, I read what I could take of Moochelle's Princeton thesis, and it scared me.
I do think there is a big difference, in the Ivies and elsewhere, between the hard sciences, and the humanities in terms of political correctness/grade inflation, etc.
I think an engineering degree from MIT would still today mean a whole lot.
I don’t think a “literature” degree from Harvard would, however.