Wow! Such a good movie.

The greatest movie ever made..!

Boring

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

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.For more FULL reviews of RECENT releases, please check out our website!

What Andrew Rossi along with the team behind this great documentary were trying to do is to get along with the full picture of what is really happening, so they make us tick about the whole system of higher education not only in America but also what is reflected of it upon the whole world.And they try to emphasize that there is a problem in all areas of higher education. Including the economical aspects as of all the bombs explode in the American economy, Student loan debt in the nation has reached 1 trillion dollars. The rise in student tuition is unsustainable, yet nearly half of the students are showing no significant gains in learning.And they discuss the idea whether college is worth it or not?"In education there are these powerful social forces, that work where people just imitate what other people are doing without reflecting on why they are doing it. Things like "How do you get into the right college?", "How does your kid get on the right track?", college has been sold and over sold as the key to a better future, And something is going very wrong with it over the last few decades." —Peter Theil, Co-founder PayPalIn "Ivory Tower" they need us to really rethink what are the specific things that people are learning and why are these things valuable? And they want the viewer to thoroughly examine the ingredients of that black-box of higher education.Jumping from the physical class to the virtual one, "Ivory Tower" tries to see if there are comparisons between both and whether or not one system is better than the other, starting from the question; What does college provide?1. Knowledge 2. Network of peers 3. Credential/DiplomaAnd whether or not some or all of these things could be provided by any of the higher education models presented.Discussing MOOCs "Massive open online courses" and whether they are going to transform America's higher education, and going through these professors who took part in the first round of MOOCs, left Stanford to start their own venture capital funded startups (Coursera, Udacity, etc…) and their rival in the east coast edX, which is coming out of MIT and Harvard.The documentary also discusses the retention and pass rates in online courses and why they are lower than face-to-face classes. "Just because you can bring a horse to water but you can't make them drink so by the same talking students have to have discipline, motivation and persistence." — Ellen Junn, Provost, San Jose State UniversityThe documentary tries to ask "How do we put these things together, the face to face and online opportunities and how we can come up with hybrid models" trying to search for solutions that could balance the system and make it future-proof.It's a very informative documentary that I would highly recommend for students, parents and anyone one with concerns about education as well.

PlotFirst the documentary follows one disadvantaged black student from a bad neighborhood get into Harvard for free and then it wonders why getting a good education for everybody else isn't just as easy. It touches back on this issue later on when a free college tries to move to a profit system and then comes down hard on an online system of education when they fall short of perfection. Surely the director must have been blinded to the advancements that have been made in this area and the scores of students that have been helped. And then I was sorry to see that little was mentioned about the cycle of rising school costs. There was some focus on it as to say it was there, but they didn't address it in any way to come to any conclusions in order to fix it. It was like watching a bull navigating a china shop without breaking through any issue the government had a role in. The documentary illustrates that the cost of tuition have dramatically increased over the years and well above the costs of other commodities, only there were no answers and no one in the here and now to hold responsible. Funny how Obama got no blame in this mess like he wasn't around to do anything about it, instead they dig up Reagan because he like Milton Friedman believed colleges need to be pay for by someone. It doesn't make sense that people who don't go to college should pay for the ones that do go to college, which is probably why this documentary only hinted at that idea. The underline question that is in play here is why our nation's students have so much debt yet that ponderance is kept at bay by a ten foot pole. Without much to say the narration swings around to the black student they started out with. He isn't doing well in any of his classes, yet he explains while driving through his rundown neighborhood that he is determined to finish his college because without it he would have nothing.Character DevelopmentThe narrative is like a leaf in the wind. There is no rhyme or reason to its direction, only simple ends up where it started.ActingNo Acting. This was a documentary.OverviewThere was only the very basic of production values. Like something that you would find on most TV shows. The only plus here would be no commercials, but to tell you the truth if I was watching this documentary on TV and was forced to watch a commercial I would probably watch something else. Since this documentary was produced by CNN I think it is a good bet that you will find it on their network before long anyway so it is probably not worth viewing it until then and subsequently it might be too much of a bother to drive to the local movie theater to see a film that doesn't ask any hard questions and avoids searching for any answers. But if you want to watch a film and walk out knowing less than you already do than this documentary will be the one you have been waiting for.

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.