Not quite schadenfreude, the Ivy League tell-all thrives on the premise that the country’s best students are no better off than the kids who ate their dust in the scramble for college admission. Unlike Kaavya Viswanathan’s ill-fated How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, the two newest additions to the glut of Ivy-themed teen lit skip the race and delve right into the college years. Robin Hazelwood’s Model Student chronicles the sad life of a fashion model at Columbia, while Diana Peterfreund’s Secret Society Girl (a self-proclaimed “Ivy League Novel”) follows a bookish junior from Eli University who gets “tapped” for a secret society traditionally reserved for rich, politically connected males. Both books promise to spill the beans, and although young readers are likely to be thrilled by all the sex and swear words that come tumbling from the same bag, the authors deliver little in the way of juicy revelation.

Secret Society Girl succeeds all the same. Ms. Peterfreund’s descriptions of the ambitious Amy Haskel’s collegial life are both vivid and amusing, and although the second half of the book focuses too much on her secret society’s rather dull battle for women’s rights, Amy herself is charming enough to be forgiven. Her ceremonial initiation into Rose & Grave—modeled after Yale’s famous Skull and Bones—runs a little long, but Amy handles it with dignity and spunk, even as the boys in the club pretend to drown her inside a coffin and threaten to make her a sex slave in their castle.

Amy’s story is both witty and endearing, peppered as it is with rhetorical questions and moments when she emphatically addresses the reader as “dude.” As she discusses her dorm-room drama, her study sessions at the library, and the awkward interactions she shares at the lit-mag office with her “friend with bennies,” Amy proves herself a rather appealing girl. She constantly makes lists to better sort through her thoughts (“WAYS TO KNOW WITHOUT ROLLING OVER TO LOOK AT HIM,” from the chapter “Morning After”; “THINGS I DISCOVERED THAT CALMED ME DOWN,” from “Barbarians”), and she’s as forward about her desires and goals as she is about her disappointments. She’s tough, too: “Show me a pining man and I’ll show you a pussy,” she says in reference to a boy who’s just told her that he loves her. To top it off, Amy knows about Said and Lévi-Strauss, and although she spends most of Secret Society Girl finding her place in Rose & Grave, we learn that during her sophomore year, she tried to read Borges in Spanish.

In Ms. Hazelwood’s Model Student, meanwhile, narrator Emily Woods begins by warning her readers that the ugly-duckling-turned-cover-girl fairy tale is “total crap.” “Life doesn’t work that way,” she writes in the prologue, “and I don’t know why we ever pretend it does. After all, did Einstein ever sigh, lean forward, and earnestly confess he was once the dumbest guy in the class?” The answer, technically, is no, but few children manage to leave primary school without learning from some smart-aleck that Einstein was a lousy student.

Emily’s story, set in the late 1980’s, begins in her hometown of Milwaukee, where she spends her days studying and finding photos of pretty girls to glue onto her wall. She falls into modeling when her father, an advertising agent, puts her in a Wisconsin tourism ad wearing a hat that looks like a piece of cheese. After the shoot, a photographer tells Emily that she could be a model (she has a killer smile), and it doesn’t take long for the girl to convince her mother, an aging social activist who reads Mother Jones and calls her cat Malcolm X, to drop $1,000 on a course at the Tami Scott School of Modeling. The school turns out to be a scam—the women enrolled “were not only not tens, but didn’t add up to tens when you included the gals on either side of them”—but Emily makes the best of it. After some local jobs and a few false starts, she moves to New York, scores herself an agent and enrolls at Columbia. From there, we learn the hard way that modeling is a very boring career, in which the highs are rare and the lows tedious. We also learn that models often have eating disorders and drug problems.

Eventually, Ms. Hazelwood starts giving Emily cocaine to help keep her awake during the endless photo-shoot scenes, but she forgets that most readers will have to get through them sober. Sadly for us, Emily works constantly, and although she’s ostensibly enrolled at Columbia throughout most of the novel, the reader only hears about it when she gets her grades at the end of every semester. The college only seems to exist so that Emily has something to fight about with her worried mother—and someplace to drop out of when she decides to focus on her career. Ms. Hazelwood’s point, obviously, is that modeling leaves no room for a proper adolescence, but it’s unfortunate that Emily’s career overwhelms the novel, leaving little room for her experiences as a college student. The combination of those two lifestyles could have been entertaining, and the pun in the book’s title suggests that it should have been Ms. Hazelwood’s main focus.

Compared to the radiant Amy Haskel, Model Student’s Emily Woods is a piece of wood, with no interests and no ambitions beyond magazine covers and (maybe) a diploma. That aside, the two girls are quite similar: Neither strays too far from the archetypes we know so well from teen fiction and film. As they hyperactively deliver their confessions, Amy and Emily sound frightened and skeptical of the worlds they attempt to penetrate, but gleeful and self-consciously wise as they let their readers in on the secrets they have learned. The top may look better than the bottom, but the girls who narrate these stories want to set the record straight: The drugs up there are just as dangerous as the ones down here, and the men no less cruel.

These two books are mostly hawking old news, seldom pulling the curtains on anything less predictable than runway anorexia and nasty corruption within the old boys’ club. Quentin Compson drowned himself in the Charles River for our sins, and all we can muster, it seems, is a minor cocaine habit and some careless sex. Secret Society Girl remains readable (thanks to Amy), but Model Student collapses on Emily’s brittle, bony shoulders. If these two books reveal anything, it’s that modern Ivy League intrigue is not so intriguing after all. And so, in the grand tradition of the exposé, the bubble is burst.

Leon Neyfakh (Harvard class of 2007) is majoring in history and literature.

On Halloween a few years ago, the story goes, Ms. Woods asked an assistant to buy a "small pumpkin" for the office. The assistant combed delis in search of the perfect J. Crew pumpkin-well proportioned, robustly hued and, of course, exactly "small." The young employee eventually settled on a pumpkin not much larger than a softball and presented her find to Ms. Woods.

"You call that a pumpkin?" Ms. Woods reportedly yelled at the assistant, in front of a roomful of J. Crew staff members. "That's not a fucking pumpkin!"

The pumpkin story tells us a few things about Ms. Woods, whose famously mercurial father, Arthur Cinader, founded J. Crew in 1980, who herself has worked there since she was 22, and who took over the top position at the company in October, when a majority stake was bought by the Texas Pacific Group, a San Francisco and Fort Worth-based private investment partnership, for $540 million. Mr. Cinader has retired at 70, and several employees who chafed under his gruff style are waiting-hoping-that Ms. Woods, free of her father's long shadow, will bring some light into what, given J. Crew's image as proselytizer for the sun-splashed, ruddy-cheeked American dream, has been a curiously grim place to work.

Internal management squabbles must be smoothed out if Ms. Woods, who retained a 15 percent interest in the company, is to turn an inefficient and, in recent years, only moderately profitable business into one that satisfies demanding investors. "They'll be adding up every inch of thread," said one current J. Crew employee of the new investors. "And Emily has never been told No."

"It's not run as efficiently as it can or should be," said Ms. Woods of J. Crew. "Can this company be more profitable? Yes."

"Dad and I worked together for 15 years, and it feels strange," she said, speaking on the telephone from the company's headquarters on lower Broadway. "I miss him … but I like challenging times, so to me I wouldn't call it pressure. I'm completely energized to move on."

So what does the pumpkin story reveal about Ms. Woods, who will be overseeing 600 employees in the New York office and 6,000 worldwide? For one, she has a very precise notion of esthetics; when she envisions a sweater or a pair of chinos, she has firm ideas about the placement of buttons, the lengths of the cuffs and the texture of the fabrics. And she expects her staff to implement those ideas as precisely as she conceived them. Ms. Woods, who based J. Crew's early designs on the clothes she had in her closet after college-well-worn jeans and big cuddly sweaters-has parlayed this talent into a $800 million-a-year giant whose name has come to denote an echt -WASP ethos. And she established a reputation as tough businesswoman who runs with a fast crowd-she's married to Hollywood producer Cary Woods, who did Scream and Gummo , and she is pals with Julia Roberts, Uma Thurman, Michael Ovitz and Ronald Perelman.

But the pumpkin story-which several employees confirmed, but which Ms. Woods said she does not remember-also illustrates how Ms. Woods is struggling with the specter of her father, an unpredictable manager known for berating employees in front of their colleagues, and who once yelled at a young J. Crew art director until she passed out at her computer. (Employees' tales of Mr. Cinader paint him as nothing so much as a Dark Side version of Seinfeld 's "Peterman," the self-enamored, nutty catalogue mogul for whom Elaine toils.)

"I think his leaving is a huge weight off her shoulders," said a high-level executive at J. Crew. "I've noticed a huge difference. She's being demanding but in a reasonable way, instead of with that edge of craziness we're used to."

But by many accounts, Ms. Woods has inherited some of her father's penchant for dressing down employees, some of whom use words like "humiliating" and "degrading" to describe the episodes. "I do get impatient," Ms. Woods said of her management style. "It certainly would never be my intention [to humiliate someone].… I'd like to think I'm not harsh, but I am tough and challenging-I don't think anyone running a large company isn't."

"She's tough and can be intimidating," said Kelly Hill, an art director who worked contentedly for J. Crew for eight years before leaving to freelance. "That's one of the downfalls of running a company; not everyone can love you."

"Working with Emily is straightforward and concise," said Carol Sharpe, a J. Crew general merchandise manager. "Her dad is more philosophical in his approach."

Emily C. Meets J. Crew

After an outdoorsy childhood in Montclair, N.J., and New Mexico, Ms. Woods attended the exclusive and artsy Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. She graduated from the University of Denver in 1982, where she majored in marketing, and went to work for the family. Her grandfather Mitchell Cinader had started a Garfield, N.J.-based catalogue company called Popular Club Plan in 1948, to sell clothes and home furnishings, and Arthur Cinader had inherited it. J. Crew was the company's newly launched, somewhat cheesy sportswear line. Ms. Woods, then Emily Cinader, started out as an assistant buyer but soon took over the design department, gradually transforming the company into an extension of herself. Soon enough, "the J. Crew look" was born. Ms. Woods personally approved each image that appeared in the catalogue (one model in early catalogues looked eerily like Ms. Woods); her design catchword was "American," meaning, largely, East Coast boarding-school wear. (Angry mail still comes in from catalogue recipients who object to the company's quasi-Aryan esthetic.)

"Her judgments are very good," an executive at the company said. "I think that Emily has been brilliant at visually presenting the merchandise. She can take something as dumb as a Shetland sweater and make you buy three."

In 1988, J. Crew mailed out 35 million catalogues a year; today, it mails more than 80 million. But the Cinaders wanted stores, and, in 1989, J. Crew opened its first retail store at the South Street Seaport. It now has 50, all of which, Ms. Woods claims, are profitable. However, the idea for a store on Madison Avenue, the ultimate retail proving ground, has yet to materialize.

'Write Like Proust!'

As Ms. Woods' life style changed, the J. Crew look put on pearls, with new, fancier lines ("Classics" and "The Collection"), leading some employees to complain that Ms. Woods' increased social status was driving her design sense. "She wants her friends to buy J. Crew," said an employee. "It's impaired her judgment on a few things … and has a huge impact on the way she edits the line."

Ms. Woods responded that J. Crew's higher-priced lines are doing well. "We will be completely sold out of women's cashmere before Christmas," she said. "There was a group or two last spring that were sort of modern-downtown, which did terribly. But it was one or two groups out of 50 groups in six months."

While Ms. Woods ran the design team, Mr. Cinader crunched the numbers and oversaw the catalogue's copywriting department. He favored hiring Ivy League graduates-J. Crew still recruits heavily from Harvard and Yale-and goaded his staff to "write like Proust!" Mr. Cinader's dense, arguably poetic clothing descriptions were dubbed "J. Crew haikus" by his staff. ("Cashmere … spun of cashmere fibers from the necks of goats in Mongolia's finest herds.")

Ms. Woods puts work ahead of a traditional family life. Her husband spends a lot of time in Los Angeles, while she stays put in her Chelsea apartment. "He lives in New York and L.A.," Ms. Woods said. "I'm always here."

Ms. Woods described her life in New York this way: "I work out a lot. I see a lot of movies. I read a lot. I travel a fair amount, I go out to dinner almost every night and I work … If I go home before 8 or 9, I don't really know what to do with myself."

When she is not overseeing clothing designs or catalogue layouts, Ms. Woods analyzes information from J. Crew's database, which carefully tracks who's buying what. In recent years, J. Crew has attempted to target specific consumers, like children and college students.

But if Ms. Woods knows her customer inside and out, she seems less attuned to the gripes of her staff. (In the past year, six out of eight of Mr. Cinader's copywriters have quit.)

"When you're the daughter of the founder, you get to do things your way," said Kirk Palmer, a fashion industry headhunter who has recruited several senior executives from J. Crew. "She used to blow people out of the water. It was viewed as a very intense, difficult environment, a yeller-and-screamer-type atmosphere.… But I think she has matured. You don't hear the same horror stories anymore."

Asked about the turnover rate, Ms. Woods said, "All of the key people have been here three, five, seven, 10 years.… The people who aren't comfortable with [my management style] are likely to be the ex-employees."

Several current and former employees complained of nit-picky office rules-employees must whisper in management's presence; no jangling jewelry; no food in trash bins for fear of odors. Ms. Woods has been known to order employees to open their mouths and stick out their tongues if she suspects they're chewing gum.

Responded Ms. Woods: "I have a reputation of, 'Don't chew on ice, don't click your watch on the table consistently during meetings.' I'm distracted by noises. I know this is my problem, but it makes it hard for me to think at the pace I have to think here … Everyone knows not to come to meetings chewing gum."

'Married to J. Crew'

Some employees believe it was a pressing need for capital that drove Ms. Woods and Mr. Cinader to look for new investors, a scenario Ms. Woods disputed.

"I was looking for a financial partner to take the company forward because the shareholders were interested in selling their stake," she said. "We weren't doing it to raise capital. My father is 70, and his sister and the other owners were all in their 70's and 80's …The family could have continued to own the company and grow on the profits we were making."

The proper partner came along, Ms. Woods explained, via her husband, Mr. Woods, who in 1995 was talking with Texas Pacific, a $2.5 billion leveraged buyout shop that has invested in Ducati Motor S.p.A. and Del Monte Foods Company, about starting his own production company. "When they learned that he was married to J. Crew, as it were, they said, 'Well, if there's ever an opportunity to do any financial venture with those guys … we'd be very interested,'" Ms. Woods said. She flew out to San Francisco to meet the Texas Pacific people. Ms. Woods said she got a good feeling from them in part because "the office is like a J. Crew store: oak floors and maple desks."

But as talks with Texas Pacific wore on this fall, circumstances turned against the family. The United Parcel Service strike cut into business (Ms. Woods confirmed that after the strike, J. Crew failed to pay some of its suppliers on time), and the warm autumn in the Northeast affected catalogue sales. J. Crew laid off about 10 percent of its staff.

Mr. Cinader and Texas Pacific had agreed to a purchase price of about $560 million for an 85 percent share of the company, to be financed by two bond offerings totaling close to $300 million. But in late September, Moody's Investors Service gave poor ratings to the bonds, citing the company's "very high leverage … past operating inefficiencies… and J. Crew's increased fashion risk as a result of investing in diversified colors and styles …" On Oct. 10, in the wake of the poor ratings and a weak third quarter, the bond sale was delayed and the deal seemed in jeopardy.

Mr. Cinader lowered his asking price by $20 million and Texas Pacific injected an additional $20 million of capital to make the bonds more attractive. On Oct. 14, Moody's upgraded its rating for one of the two bond offerings, and the deal was soon signed.

But Mr. Cinader had kept most of the staff in the dark, a move Ms. Woods said she disagreed with. "The transaction itself wasn't communicated well to the people within the company," she said. "It's not the way I would have handled it."

In her first few weeks as head of the company, Ms. Woods has been meeting with the J. Crew staff, trying to make nice, subtly promising a change from her father's management style. "The communication going forward will be more open and direct," she said. "Emotionally for people, that's very exciting."

Fashion industry analyst Alan Millstein said that although "the mail-order business is fraught with problems" because of unpredictable seasonal sales patterns, J. Crew's primary strength is Ms. Woods' reliably staid designs. "On balance, they'll be the winners of the 90's because investors don't want agita . J. Crew is no Donna Karan."

But in their Sept. 29 report on J. Crew, analysts at Moody's grasped the complicated nature of Ms. Woods' relationship to the company. Moody's noted that she "has been largely responsible for maintaining the brand's consistent image … which has minimized fashion risk," but expressed concern over J. Crew's "reliance on Emily Woods …"

Neither Ms. Woods nor Texas Pacific would disclose the terms of her contract, but she said she plans to stick around for "the next 20 years."

"Whatever transformations the company goes through in the future," Ms. Woods said, "I think of it as very much mine."