What makes Harvard that good of a university?

Yes, we all know Harvard University tops the list of the most prestigous, well-respected university in the United States. I want to know why, though. What makes Harvard, Yale, or another Ivy League school that much better than a good state school. Is the quality of education a student recieves at an Ivy Leaguue school many orders of magnitude above someplace like … oh, UC Berkeley or the University of Colorado, or just a little bit better?

Money mostly. They have huge endowment, and know how to use it.

Well so did John Holmes but no one ever called him a good university!

Well, certainly not better than the University of Colorado, if that’s what you’re asking…

Having lots of money, they get to hire the professors with the most impressive records. They also get to bring in the most prestigious visiting speakers and visiting professors, set up endowed chairs, etc… Also, the more professors you have, the smaller the classroom sizes. They can offer lots of scholarship money to graduate students. They can build new facilities constantly, get all the latest technology for their labs, maintain a top-notch library, and so forth.

Does this actually lead to the number one undergraduate education? Well there’s quite a bit written on the subject. Expensive facilities and libraries don’t necessarily lead to a good educational experience, but they can help. What really matters in the end is the quality of the teaching. There’s no great education without great educators. Now the profs considered most prestigious are usually the ones with the most journal articles published, and some journals are considered better than others. Do those people also deliver the best education in the classroom? Sometimes, sometimes not.

Their reputation of being great has a lot to do with it as well. Since they are great they have great students clamoring to get in and great professors want to teach there.

gazpacho has it. Yes, they have a large endowment, but they also have the fact that they’re Harvard. The very best professors want to teach there, and the very best students want to study there. That makes for an atmosphere that promotes excellence. Very few students go to Harvard because they couldn’t find anyplace else to go, or because they just wanted to party. Harvard can afford to turn down not only students it doesn’t want, but also professors it doesn’t want, so they take only the best.

That said, the quality of the education you receive depends on many factors – which subjects you decide to study, how much you apply yourself, whether your particular learning style meshes with the teaching style of the school and your professors, etc. Contrary to what ITR champion said, Harvard at the undergraduate level has very large class sizes, at least for lecture classes. Professors give the lectures, and then graduate students do the teaching in small group sections. If this approach works for you, you can learn a lot, but if you prefer to have closer interaction with the professors, you might be better off at a different school.

Yeah, their reputation as the US’s flagship university has fed a virtuous cycle for them, where their fame attracts more money which attracts more topnotch students and professors and programs which garner more fame which attracts more money…etc.

Probably almost every individual feature of Harvard’s academic assets can be equalled or excelled by its counterpart at some other US institution. And certainly the overall “Harvard experience” doesn’t give universal satisfaction (I’ve known several students and a few professors who had the opportunity to go there, and took it because “you don’t turn down Harvard”, and weren’t happy). But when all’s said and done, it’s still Harvard, the flagship university, unequalled in overall prestige as well as resources.

I don’t know if it’s true that the quality of undergraduate education, however measured, would be many orders of magnitude above other schools. I don’t think anyone makes that claim, certainly not rankings.

The two examples you used here are limited in several ways, ways that may prevent them from offering an equivalent experience. One is general resources. They don’t have the huge endowment Harvard has, as others have noted. Another is the fact that they are public schools. Instead of having a large national (or international) pool of prospective students, they are expected (even required) to admit a certain number of state residents. Of course, being flagships, they can certainly accept the cream of the crop in their state, but they can’t just go after the best and the brightest nationwide.

This is true. But it’s worth bearing in mind that the graduate students at Harvard aren’t your typical graduate students. Some of them are easily as capable as a bog-standard lectuerer/professor at a regular university.

You can get a quality education at **just about ** any university, and you can get a crap education at any university. A lot of what you get out of the experience depends on what you put into the experience, just like Life.

That said, I second what the others have said about a virtuous cycle.

I like Kinstu’s use of the term virtuous circle because it says it all in one sharp phrase.

One way to measure the effectiveness of a school is to look at what its graduates accomplish. You find Harvard grads everywhere, in every top job, in every profession, in every celebrated walk of life.

Of course, it’s also easier to get into those jobs and professions with the connections one makes at Harvard.

Are there real differences in quality of education between colleges? Absolutely. I went to an undergraduate school that is often ranked in the top 25. My master-level graduate work, because of my interests and finances, was split between state universities in two states. In neither school were the graduate-level courses anywhere near as difficult or demanding as my undergraduate work. I can’t believe this would still be true at Harvard.

Or at Berkeley, which is among a handful of state universities which are as exceptional as the ivies. OTOH, Cornell, though a top 25 school, is always ranked many places down from a Harvard, even if it is in the Ivy League.

I’d heard that it was the top choice of the best applicants, and that and that alone made it the most prestigious.

I’ll echo the virtuous circle bit.

As much as people may not want to hear it, you are better off going to a well known school with a good reputation than some school ranked highly in “student enjoyment” or "lifestyle: some other such BS. Do you want a “quality education” or a job when you graduate?

I didn’t go to Harvard, but I did go to a decently (but not great) ranked business school. I also transfered there from an unranked business school after two semesters. It definitely made a world of difference. The quality of the courses, the students, the companies that recruited there, the on-campus recruiting process itself were all vastly superior at the more highly ranked school.

It’s extremely difficult for a professor to gain tenure at Harvard. To do so, one must be outstanding in their field. This policy of withholding tenure ensures that professors are constantly striving to impress the powers that be with their skills and stay up to date in their subject. In the penultimate year of an assistant professorship, a dossier is put together which focuses on scholarship, teaching ability, and service to the school. Academics from outside the university are asked to critique the professor in question, comparing him or her to peers in the field, and, if all reports are favorable, the professor may then be placed on the tenure track, to achieve tenure in 8 years or so. Currently, ~35% of professors actually achieve tenure, with the other 65% moving on to other schools after the end of their terms.

I can only directly speak to Yale: it isn’t any better than a top-level state school like the University of Maryland, College Park. In fact, in many ways the undergraduate education suffers because one the one hand the students are coddled beyond belief and on the other hand the students honestly think they’re better than everyone else and so they don’t need to apply themselves. If they do badly (often limited to a C, by the way) it couldn’t be that they never read the book or took notes or paid attention in class or did the homework; it must be the fault of a bad instructor.

The other side is that what with such huge resources the graduate programs are generally highly selective and of amazing quality. Of course, some departments at a given school are better or worse than others.

My father is currently working on a book about historians and autobiography. As a part of that he got a contract to write an article for Harvard Magazine about Harvard history professors who wrote autobiographies. What he conveniently forgot to mention to them was that many of these people had very negative attitudes towards the place. But as he put it, “If they refuse to print the final draft of my article, I can always offer it to Yale magazine instead.”

This was true for the freshman-level courses, core classes and some of the science track courses that every physics, bio and chem major had to take, but beyond that most classes were of a fairly reasonable size (15-30 people), with the professors doing most of the teaching. The professors were also pretty accessible, and it wasn’t too difficult to meet with them outside of class.

It was also kind of neat that visiting professors and lecturers routinely stayed in the student dorms.

Yes, like Yale, where calculus classes (say) are taught completely in sections, the vast majority of which are led entirely by a graduate student who spends many hours a week working on the class as opposed to their research and is monetarily conpensated for it, but is still not an “employee”. [/rant]

Stanford University, Harvard, Yale, and others are extremely well endowed offering scholarships to the better students and are able to secure the most desireable professors because of reputation and larger salaries. It is arguable whether or not Harvard is no. one in the country.