All this pother about Harvard re: Blair Hornstein got me to thinking: how did Harvard get to be regarded as THE American college? Is it that it has the best educators? The most comprehensive curriculum? Is it a chicken-egg thing: it’s hardest to get into because so many people apply, and so many people apply because of the prestige of getting into a school that’s hard to get into?
Side note: Is HLS also regarded as the best American law school? If so, why would that be?
Well, Harvard is old. Not Oxford old, but old in the sense that we Americans know about old things.
Princeton is pretty old too.
IMHO, Ivy League schools are very overrated. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll get an excellent education if you go, but you’re not going to learn anything you can’t figure out at a less prestigious school or state college.
One could argue, however, that education isn’t the sole reason for attending an Ivy, and that one of the benefits a person potentially receives is the connections made while in school – the thinking being that, hey, G.W. Bush went to Yale, and maybe your freshman roommate at Ivy U. will turn out that important as well. Another way to look at it is that these schools are where America’s upper echelons send their children, and the relationships formed there can provide one with entree into establishment society.
Even without these connections, as a friend who went to MIT related to me, an Ivy (or equivalent) diploma will open doors. Basically, people see that degree on your resume, and they automatically assume you’ve gotten a quality education.
Now, this just leads back to the OP’s question of how places like Harvard got to have those reputations in the first place, and my guess would be that age does have a lot to do with it – back when these schools were founded, only the upper classes were able to afford college educations, which then serves to perpetuate the rich-and-best-educated cycle, making the rest of society feel inferior.
How Harvard in particular got to be THE school, though, I can’t say.
Harvard was founded in 1636 which makes it the oldest of the Ivy schools, predating the next oldest (Yale) by 65 years. That adds a lot to the prestige.
There’s definitely a chicken-and-egg situation, not just with students but also with research. Well-known schools produce cutting edge research results which attract first rate researchers and lots of funding, which leads to more results. If you are a student intending to go into research, it’s a big advantage to study and work in such an environment.
Definitely a critical mass situation:
It’s the oldest school in the US (or at least Ivy) - so it started out as THE place to go, and has been able to maintain that standing without dropping the ball
It has the biggest endowment by far - so it has the money to spend on faculty, research, etc.
Its reputation leads academics to want it on their resume, so it can more easily attract quality
It has been where a number of innovations have been made in the approach to education - I can only think of one off the top of my head - the more formal formation of a Business School and the use of case-based learning within that - but I seem to recall there are others in Law, Med School, Government and others…
It has become an easy shorthand for Smart, Well-Connected, and Desirable for undergrads, grads, businesses doing hiring and the media for denoting “the best”
All of these things feed on each other, reinforcing the…stereotype, if you will. Harvard would have to screw up pretty badly to lose it. WRT its business school, which has the rep of being “the best” (yes, many others like Stanford Wharton and Kellogg are regularly voted best in Business Week, but Harvard’s - along with Wharton - are the first and therefore have a mystique about them…) - however, it was considered to have “fallen behind” in the early 90’s and had to go through a re-structuring period - adding more quant analysis to the curriculum, including group work to complement individual assessment, etc…but they did these things and their reputation was restored.
And yes, to my knowledge Harvard Law School’s rep is that of being the best, which to me means - it is a genuinely education + great placement opportunities (i.e., the most desirable law firms recruit from there) + great networking + Harvard mystique. Many other schools have very similar combos, but Harvard has “cross over” to the public consciousness as being the best, just like people who don’t know physics know Einstein and Relativity, or people who don’t know literature know Joyce’s Ulysses by reputation…
sorry for the typos - should preview better!
“genuinely GOOD education”
“crossED over”
eesh.
As someone who has just gone through the law school application process, I have the impression that most people with an interest in the legal field tend to consider Yale the premier American law school. Not too many people, though, think of schools in a literal ranking scheme, but rather in terms of tiers – e.g. the first tier is almost universally acknowledged to be Yale, Harvard, and Stanford, second tier is generally Columbia (some people promote Columbia to the top tier because it too is an Ivy League school), NYU, and maybe Chicago or Michigan, and so on down the list. Whether or not HLS is regarded as the best American law school is debatable, but the tier of schools to which it belongs is almost universally acknowledged to be the best.
As to why that is, I think it comes down to age, endowment, reputation, and name recognition combining to build up some serious instutitional momentum over the years.
Harvard, Yale, and Stanford are pretty much considered the three “best” law schools; right now U.S. News & World Report puts it at #1 Yale, #2 Stanford, #3 Harvard. Columbia and NYU are still top tier: they’re #4 and #5. U.S. News’ tier system rates the top 50 first tier, next top 50 second tier, and so on.
Still, it seems like every movie and TV lawyer in the fricken’ world went to Harvard. Allie McBeal, Soul Man, Legally Blonde, you name it, they all went to Harvard. I think the writers assume that the only school the average citizen knows of as one of (if not the very) “best” or most “presigious” law school is Harvard, and if they say a character went to Yale (or God forbid, University of Texas!) we won’t get the message.
[Slight hijack]
Absolutely right. I was just grouping the reputations of the top-ranking schools the way someone who had been admitted to the top 7 or 8 schools and had to choose between them probably would. A lot of the other prospective law students that I met would have a hard time deciding between Yale and Harvard or between Columbia and NYU, but not between Yale and NYU – there’s enough of a gap between the reputations of those schools to put them at different levels in the minds of most applicants.
[/Slight hijack]
How much of a difference does a diploma from a prestige school really make? And how long does that prestige last?
At what point do your credentials and experience carry more weight than your school?
Some law firms will only consider first year associates if they graduated from a tier one law school.
Continuing the law school hijack: Harvard was where the modern form of legal education was perfected - lecture classes based on case law and socratic dialogue. So there’s a reason it has traditionally been seen as the most influential, although IMHO it isn’t quite in the same intellectual league as Yale, Standford and Chicago. That’s a separate question from these schools’ reputations, which are as much rooted in tradition and inertia as in actual quality of education.
At some firms, where you went to school will always matter. They care about where their associates came from for their furm resume value. In some places, no one cares as long as you passed the bar.
Depending on your area of law, I’d say that by 7 years out, your experience should matter more than where you went to school, especially if you come with a paying clientele.
At some firms, where you went to school will always matter. A friend was looking for a job. Went to first tiered schools all the way, had 5 years of solid experience under his belt. A firm more or less courted him, but still asked for his transcripts. No one else did this. They care about where their associates come from < cynically > for their firm resume < /cynically >.
Depending on the area of law, I’d say that about 5 years out, your experience should matter more than where you went to school, especially if you come with a nice client porfolio. If your portfolio is nice enough, that trumps all.
I remember a Newsweek article that said that your diploma pretty much mattered only to get your first job. After that they know if you’re an idiot or not.
I do not know about the Law School but my wife had her bachelors, masters, and PhD from Harvard. She worked her ass off to be there, and works her ass off still. Harvard like many Ivy Leagues is a very nepoticious school. My wife was the first generation to go. Yeah she’s a smarty.
As an American who went to Oxford - Exeter College - to be exact, I do not hold the age factor very high on my reasons for a school to be credible and/or desirable to go to.
I judge a school not by the color of it’s skin but by the integrity of it’s faculty and administration. I was honored to study in a school where Tolkien himself lived and worked. It made me want to be proud of where I went.
Is Springfield College for the Gifted and Talented any less than a Harvard or Oxford? Why? Answer that and you have a good starting point to answering the OP.
There are so many facets going into what makes a good school. I wish I had the time to go into them…Maybe when I get home and the wife can had her 2 cents.
There’s nothing “magical” about Harvard. Some school has to be the best (or top 10 best) and it just happens that by some confluance of ciriculum, location and age Harvard ended up attracting a lot of bright students that became successfull. Once a school gets a reputation for being the best, it’s easy to keep. Companies recruit there trying to find the best students and the best students flock to the school because it has a reputation for attracting the best companies…who are looking for the best students.
That’s it.
There’s no magic to the ciriculum. Accounting and finance at Harvard are the same accounting and finance that you will learn in any relatively prestigeous school. It’s not like they teach you the “special” stuff only Harvard students learn.
There is, however a large diference in the caliber of student between the top schools (like Harvard) and the bottom schools (like Jerkwater Community College).
Yes. Not as much at the undergrad level. Top students at the top 50 or so universities all have more or less the same chances. At the graduate level, prestige becomes even more important. Many of the top consulting firms (like McKinsey) and investment banks (like Solomon Brothers) won’t consider you for associate programs unless you have a MBA from a top school or are able to distinguish yourself in other ways.
The prestige lasts forever, however if you are wondering how much work experience is required before Goldman Sachs will consider you to be at the same level as a HBS graduate, I would guess that it would never happen. The reason is that while Johnny Avererageschool is working some regular job, Lance Wharton is in an I-Bank or strat firm associate or in a Fortune 500 management trainee program. Five years down the road, Mr Averageschool is still in the same job getting 2-4% raises while Mr Wharton is positioned as a manager or director. So while Cardinal’s article has a point:
it fails to take into acount that your first job then builds on your second job and so on.
These are extreme examples and obviously smart people can excel in life regardless of what school they attended. The point is that success builds on more success.
Sorry I’m not replying to individual posts. I am reading all this, and it’s very informative; thank you all for applying. I do want to directly address this:
Yeah, that kinda grates on me. When I was in 11th grade and we were all stressing about applying to colleges, my English teacher gave us a lot of useful advice, and one thing really stood out (I may have mentioned this in one of the Hornstein threads). She told us of a student years earlier who applied to Harvard and didn’t get in, despite having a lock on being valedictorian. She did become valedictorian, but according to Mrs. F., “Harvard could fill an entire freshman class with valedictorians, and still have people left over. They’re looking for someone super-special, with a lot to offer that can’t be measured by grades.” Which this person apparently didn’t have.
So when I encounter a fictional character who supposedly went to Harvard, or read/watch something that’s set at Harvard, I measure the character against what I know of Harvard’s standards, and usually conclude, “No…that does not compute.”
And I have another question: When applying to top-tier schools, how much does it matter where you went to high school? My HS was public, Midwestern, and, IMHO, pretty mediocre, but we did have some students who went on to places like Cal Tech, Notre Dame, Rice, and Columbia. (Although it was generally, University of Illinois if you were a good student, Northwestern if you were above average.) Rightly or wrongly, I thought that another strike against the Harvard applicant was simply that being val. at our school was like being Employee of the Month at McDonald’s: relatively speaking, so what?
I agree that the Ivy schools, including Hahvahd, are very overrated. I mean, if a moron like George W. can get into an Ivy school, how academically good can they really be?
The best public universities, including the University of Michigan, University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are every bit as good as the Ivies.
True, but with Prescott Bush as grandfather and the first President Bush as father, W. could have been an inarticulate drunk and still have been accepted into Yale. Oh, wait… 
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I definitely don’t dispute that, but the fact remains that if your ultimate goal is to work at an elite law firm or a prestigious nonprofit, you’re more likely to get your foot in the door with a degree from Harvard Law rather than one from Michigan.