<p>Harvard seniors overwhelmingly said they enjoyed their time in Cambridge: 91.7 percent of the Class of 2012 said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their Harvard experience, and when presented with the option of deciding on college again, 94.5 percent of graduates said they would again choose Harvard.</p>
<p>Really interesting results from the Harvard Crimson: Harvard</a> Crimson: Sex, drugs, and consulting in the Class of 2012: The Crimson's sixth annual senior survey</p>
<p>I wonder what those same graduates will say at their 25th reunion. I am sure the percentage who would choose Harvard again will still be high, but will it be that high?</p>
<p>And I wonder whether they’ll encourage their children to apply to Harvard. I mean, I’m sure I know how they’d answer that question now, but how will they answer it 25 years from now?</p>
<p>Hope they know that their answers have been uploaded to the alum network and now the alum network is dead to them! :p</p>
<p>Sikorsky makes a good point.</p>
<p>But texaspg, I don’t think that’s fair. They may have still enjoyed their time but decided in the end that a more professional school, or a smaller liberal arts school, or a more religious school would have been better for them.</p>
<p>With respect to my second question, whether they’ll encourage their children to apply to Harvard: I have to concede, it’s much easier to answer that question affirmatively when it’s all theoretical. </p>
<p>After your children arrive, and start turning into who they’re going to be, you learn that parents have a lot less control over some matters than you thought before you had kids.</p>
<p>I am only saying that in jest and I have no affiliation with H like Sikorsky.</p>
<p>However. it sounds like only 400+ people answered the survey. How extrapolatable is this to the entire class? </p>
<p>The graph I found most interesting - 2.1 percent knew they were gay in freshman year but ended with 4.8%. I wonder if this is common.</p>
<p>I think it’s no secret that I haven’t been around Harvard in eons, but I’m almost surprised it’s only 4.8%. </p>
<p>My wife used to say that by January of senior year, any time one of her friends said to her earnestly, “I need to talk to you,” she wanted to cut right to the chase: “Again? You too? OK, you’re gay. I’m fine with that. Hope you are, too. So can we just wrap this up so I can get to dinner?”</p>
<p>Actually, it will probably be a lower number of dissatisfied alumni/ae as Yale’s “Bright College Years” puts it that over time college years are viewed : “thru memory’s haze, those happy golden, bygone days.” Even those who swore that they would never give a penny to Harvard Law School (which in those days was more like The Paper Chase than not) are now coming to reunions–I dare say that it is even more for a place like the College, which always has a much greater emotional claim than would a professional school.</p>
<p>Of course, once the Admissions Committee rubbishes their progeny, then all bets are off…</p>
<p>I believe in 2007 or so, the proportion surveyed who wouldn’t choose Harvard again was 20-25%, so this is a substantial improvement. Of course, this survey (and probably the older one too) was voluntary, so all results should be taken with a grain of salt.</p>
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<p>It should be very extrapolatable to the entire class. 420 individuals represents ~25% of the whole class. Unless the sample was very non-random and seriously biased in some way, polling a 25% slice of a population is way more than enough to get an accurate sample. In fact it’s overkill.</p>
<p>^ but how can you tell whether the sample was “very non-random and seriously biased” or not? For all we know, it could have been very lopsided - it’s just not possible to tell without a random survey to compare it to.</p>
<p>“The Crimson’s survey of the Class of 2012 was conducted through a secure website that ensured only one response per senior. It drew 420 responses between May 8 and May 14, 2012.”</p>
<p>It is not clear that they targeted specific students vs accepted the results from those who responded?</p>
<p>Wow. There are some interesting nuggets in there.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Nice trick: Male members of single-sex clubs say final clubs should remain single sex by 67%-33%. Female members of single-sex clubs agree by 60%-40%. But ALL members of single-sex clubs believe final clubs should remain single sex by 85%-15%. So . . . either the Crimson has a problem with math, or there is some substantial population of members of single-sex clubs who are neither male nor female but overwhelmingly support the status quo. (At a minimum, that population would have to be roughly the same size as the total number of men and women who were members of single-sex clubs for the numbers to have any chance of working. Is “arrogant nerd” a sex?)</p></li>
<li><p>The numbers on people highly satisfied or satisfied with their House life does not exactly support the claims of Harvardians that the House system is as good as or better than the Yale Residential College system. Very tepid.</p></li>
<li><p>Less than half of respondents satisfied with academic advising? That’s really low.</p></li>
<li><p>Almost two thirds of respondents claim never to have tried marijuana? Really? And hardly anyone has ever used study drugs?</p></li>
<li><p>But 12% claim to have had sex in the Widener stacks. Yeah, right. If you define sex as something you can do by yourself . . . . (I hate to say it, but that could well be the operative definition at Harvard.)</p></li>
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<p>Actually, given what I remember of academic advising then, and what I hear about it now from friends with children in the College, Harvard’s getting off easy on this one!</p>
<p>There are many extraordinary and wonderful things about Harvard. Academic advising isn’t really one of them.</p>
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<p>That sounds a phenomenon that could actually occur – at Yale.</p>
<p>Yale’s social orgs are an interesting case. The frats are definitely still single-sex, but then so are most frats and sororities across college campuses in the US. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. The reason why Harvard’s equivalent (in fact, a number of the final clubs actually started as frats with Greek names) orgs and clubs get into so much hot water and controversy every so often is simply because of the relatively unique situation of inequality/imbalance in space distribution. All the male clubs own physical space, while the female groups (being comparatively recent creations) have no real estate of their own and have had to rent space from the male clubs. Add to that the more insular nature of punching and lack of general access to the spaces and it’s no wonder there’s controversy. </p>
<p>No one seems to be suggesting that frats at other schools should become coed, any more than calls for sororities to become coed…since most places don’t have the the problem of real estate as Cambridge/Harvard Square does. </p>
<p>Anyway. Yale’s senior societies have almost become poster children for diversity in recent years. While the frats aren’t co ed, the senior societies are very much so.</p>
<p>There has been a radical re-do of the advising system, especially as it pertains to freshmen. If anything there seems to be an over abundance-- between the academic advisor, the proctor, the peer counselor, the Freshman Yard Dean (four deans over see parts of Harvard Yard and the non-Yard freshman dorms) if a freshman doesn’t have someone with whom to speak it is as much their fault as anyone’s (also, there is the Bureau of Study Council and the Writing Center for academic issues). Harvard Health is a mess–their psychology/psychiatry is band-aid at best (but frankly, from what I know of other universities it is about par–but that is wholly inadequate…)
The advising once someone declares a concentration is fairly good (very concentration dependent of course-- and as the advisors are resident tutors in the Houses there is too much variability-- too much is in the hands of the House master as to the tutor selection and not enough in the departments’…)<br>
Where there is a real problem is with sophomores who no longer have their freshman advising system but haven’t yet been able to plug into the concentration system (they get advisers based upon possible concentrations but as these advisors are not knowledgable about Harvard across the board their advice is very patchy) . They can be lost…It is, I would guess, one of the reasons why Harvard is having sophomores declare their concentrations a semester earlier than before.<br>
Until Harvard solves the problem that freshmen and the upperclassmen in many respects occupy two separate existences this problem will not be solved–of course that brings me to my favorite hobby-horse, that Harvard such adopt the Yale system of having freshman dorms/entries associated with an upperclass House and that freshmen are considered part of that house from the moment they enter campus-- already they are part of a house by spring break so this is not much of a change, but it means that advising can be done much more seamlessly…</p>
<p>I think that Harvard refuses to consider it because of the NIH problem (not invented here)–and not wanting to have to admit that Yale got something right (although the house “senior tutor” is not the house “dean” which is ape-ing Yale…)</p>
<p>My freshman advisor was also my resident tutor. He was fine. Mostly because he had a really, really cute dog.</p>
<p>Him: “blah blah”
exul: (to dog) “come here puppy how are you mwah mwah”
him: “I think you are all set”
exul: “glad we are all on the same page then”</p>
<p>For the most part, I have to agree with what etondad wrote about Harvard advising.</p>
<p>If anything, I found advising to be “overly abundant.” First-years are advised by their proctors…which worked out fine for me. Even though I was a science guy and my proctor was a humanities person, she gave me incredibly sound advice regarding which classes I should take based on my interests and performance on placement tests. She made several prescient statements about my initially chosen curriculum: too difficult, not enough balance, etc. She guided me toward a manageable courseload, which contributed significantly to my happiness freshman year. </p>
<p>I had an even better advising relationship, albeit informal, with the guy who lived across the hall from me freshman year. He was a proctor but for a different proctor group. In the course of crashing his group’s studybreaks, I learned he was a pediatric cardiologist at MGH. He was generous enough to invite me to shadow him during a few clinic sessions. Those experiences really made an impression on me. He transitioned seamlessly from EKG interpretation to working with the sick kids (making them smile) to explaining the treatment plan to their parents. He had a really great way of interacting with both adults and children. Seeing how he helped those families inspired me to consider a future medical career.</p>
<p>At the beginning of my sophomore year, I was assigned a “tutor” (academic advisor) in my field of concentration (biochemistry). I recall my tutor being a really funny German post-doc. Once a month, we chatted over coffee about my classes, crystallography, biomedical research, and labs that I might want to join. I enjoyed talking to him, and he gave me incredibly useful advice on how to navigate the choosing-a-lab process. We continued to meet on a regular basis until the end of my junior year. At that time, the advising was stepped up a notch to the “Head Tutor” for the biochem dept. That’s when things got a little weird. Although the head tutor doled out sound academic advice, I found him, on a personal level, to be rather…strange. (That’s the nicest way I could put it.) He had some oddball tics that I found troubling – frequent use of verbal crutches, awkward mid-sentence pauses lasting 30 seconds, EXCESSIVE rubbing of his nose, pressured speech. Other students in the dept. felt the same way about him; we had fun guessing what was wrong with him. Now I think he’s the dept. chair for Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharm at HMS. </p>
<p>Outside of departmental advising, I was assigned a tutor at my upperclass house. I met with that guy a few times a semester during my sophomore and junior years. When I voiced an interest in applying to med school, I was immediately assigned a pre-med tutor (internist at Beth Israel). She turned out to be very nice and encouraging. I shadowed her for a few afternoons as well.</p>
<p>Harvard tutored me to death, but I didn’t mind. :-)</p>
<p>I have no idea if the advising system at Yale or any other school is better or worse.</p>
<p>I agree with JHS, there is something fishy with this study. One thing that really came to mind were the majority of percents that didn’t match up with whole numbers in the drug category. Out of the 420 surveyed, “0.2%” and “96.4%” don’t exactly go into whole numbers…</p>