Natalie Portman.
While it doesn’t really mean much, Princeton has actually edged Harvard out fairly regularly in the past few years in many of the review magazines.
Ultimately at the UNDERGRADUATE (strictly speaking UG) level, Harvard is good, but not so good that it’s a universal best choice.
Firstly, you’d be surprised to find out that Harvard’s financial situation isn’t immensely favorable over all other university’s. There are many that have more than adequate amounts of money.
The quality of teaching also isn’t staggering in comparison to everywhere else. There are bad teachers everywhere who have jobs because they are brilliant researchers and carry with them a huge amount of prestige because of their published works/et cetra. But these people may not be worth a damn at education students.
When you go to a more prestigious school, what you are MOSTLY paying for is the atmosphere. The instruction, the way the subject is laid out et cetra isn’t so much better at Harvard that it warrants paying the price tag (same goes for any Ivy League school.) What may or may not be worth the price tag is the atmosphere you have in going to school with people who were chosen via an extremely rigorous selections process, people who are very committed at succeeding.
From a purely economic and practical standpoint it makes almost no sense for people in many careers to go to Harvard. In most occupations, accounting, law, medicine, et al, the place your diploma comes from IS very important in job placement. But of course the diploma I am referring to is your terminal degree.
A law firm isn’t going to care where you went for undergrad if you graduate in the top 5% of your class at one of the top 10 most prestigious schools in the country.
Economically speaking it makes the most sense to go to a less expensive school for 4 years, get excellent grades, then for graduate work apply at a more prestigious school.
At the graduate level I’d say there is a more clear cut academic advantage with the more prestigious schools. Especially in research fields because that’s where more money will truly make an insurmountable difference.
I heard one time from a friend that getting good grades at Harvard (School of Business) wasn’t all that hard. At the time he told me getting his coursework done as an undergrad in Economics really wasn’t that tough in the end b/c a person could always count on a good curve at the end. This same friend later told me though that grad school at Harvard was totally different and much harder thn what his undergrad studies in econ had been. Is this generally accepted as true, or did he just seem to get the right teachers at the right time?
At least one of the reasons that the Ivy League schools have their reputation is that, for most of their history, they functioned as finishing schools for the rich and socially prominent. A Harvard degree meant that you came from a family that could get you into Harvard and pay the freight. George Bush didn’t get into Yale and Harvard B-school based on his academic accomplishments.
I don’t have any personal experience to contribute, but this book may be relevant:
Harvard Schmarvard: Getting Beyond the Ivy League to the College That is Best for You, was written by a Harvard grad married to a Harvard grad. It looks closely at the Ivy League mystique and the whole question of what makes a school “good.”
People interested in this sort of thing may also like Katchadourian and Boli’s book Cream of the Crop which followed up on a graduating class from Stanford to see what impact their elite education had on them ten years out. More an academic book, but very readable. It’s probably out of print, but the library may have it.
While it is true that a lot of teaching is done in large lecture courses with discussion sections taken by undergraduates, Harvard is somewhat unusual in that it encourages (requires?) even the most senior faculty to interact with undergraduates by teaching introductory and survey courses and undergraduate seminars. I had several small seminars taught by senior faculty and did my thesis with a quite famous person (in his field) as my advisor.
I would almost say that Harvard’s reputation in some fields, particularly the liberal arts (and more particularly history) is in spite of, rather than because of, their wealth and academic strength. My honors supervisor at Penn State taught at Harvard for a few years before taking a seemingly less prestigious position at PSU. Before I graduated, I asked him why he’d left. He shrugged and said, “Money.” Well, that, and that they treated him like dirt as well as paying him like dirt. He almost doubled his salary by going to Penn State.
When I was looking at grad schools to study for a master’s degree in British history, nearly everyone I talked to outside of the field asked me if I was looking at Harvard. Everybody in the know, though, knew that Harvard’s history department wasn’t in the same league as schools like Princeton, Virginia, or the University of Toronto (the last of which I attended). Even Ohio State and Minnesota were considered better choices.
When I finally ended up at Oxford, I got to know many professors there who took “sabbaticals” (actually, more like free-agent gigs) at American universities. Harvard was far down on the list of preferred places to moonlight. Why? As one don put it to me, “If I wanted to be somewhere that paid poorly and was riddled with in-fighting, I would stay right here (at Oxford).”
In short, in my field at least, the top academics try to stay away from Harvard. They know that, if they can be better paid and better treated elsewhere, why put up with it for the name?
Not always. I was accepted at Harvard in the early 80’s and turned them down in favor of Rice University. For what I was interested in (engineering) Rice had a stronger program.
A friend of mine who is now a professor at UCLA was also accepted at Harvard as an undergrad and turned them down.
Both of us take great pleasure in informing Harvard grads of this fact … . 
“You went to Harvard? Oh yeah, that was my back-up school … .”
Harvard is very good. But there are many other universities that are just as good, and many individual programs that are better.
You can’t expect any one school to be top flight with every single program.
Of course that brings up the point that wholistic rankings of University’s are fairly useless.
I mean, if you truly want to become a good doctor, teacher, et cetra you’ll probably try to look at the rankings that rank different individual programs.
Then there’s this:
Great reading, all. Thanks for your responses; I’m learning a lot, even though I went to SUNY Buffalo.
cite?? I keep hearing this about George Bush but I can find no one who knows his SAT scores and GPA. You may be right but I would like to see proof. :dubious:
My experience from both hiring and having a wide range of Engineers working under me is that at the Bachelor’s level there is absolutely no difference at all between an MIT/Big Name School grad and a K-State grad. IMO what differentiates them at that level is more a combination of other factors. I don’t know if there is a significant difference at the Masters or higher level.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/20/timep.affirm.action.tm
http://www.usa-presidents.info/gwbush.htm
Personally, I think Bush is much smarter than he is given credit for. Another article makes the point that his college grades were better than Al Gore’s, who generally is thought of as something of an intellectual (and who got into Harvard as a Senator’s son). I simply offered Bush as someone whose elite background got him a fast track to an elite education, as opposed to some grocery clerk’s kid with the same grades and test scores. An Ivy League school is a social credential as much as an academic one. In other words, the degree doesn’t itself confer the advantage; the advantage very often preceded the degree.
Thanks for the cites. I agree with your opinion.
Interestingly, many companies prefer to hire excellent candiates from sencond tier schools instead of having to deal with the salary premiums and egos of an Ivy League grad. Quite often people from top schools forget that in the real world, they still know jack shit compared to someone who has been working in the industry for ten years.
Then, of course, you have companies like top I-banks and consulting firms that take pride in their employees pedigrees. My firm hires a lot of Cornell and MIT grads (why, I don’t know given the nature of our work) while the firm we partner with hires MBAs from a predetermined list. They are pretty lame about it the way they clump together in “classes” like it should matter at this point. (My school is on that list so I always get molested when I run into one of their employees who is also an alum).
Really, for what they pay, they should be hiring people with 15 years of actual experience instead of 28 year old kids out of school. (I love it when new BAs are told to tell clients “I am in my first year” instead of “I have three weeks experience”).
I guess it’s better to have people you can pretend know what they are talking about instead of people who actually know what they are talking about.
As I think I mentioned before in this thread, Yale definitely currently makes its instructors do everything humanly possible to preserve the undergraduates’ grades from soft curving to allowing drops the last day of class. There’s no reason this wouldn’t have been the case back then.