This discussion was created from comments split from: Whats so unique about Harvard.
I registered mainly to provide a cautionary tale about my experience at Harvard. What makes it unique? In my mind, the size of the chasm between the myth and the reality of the quality of undergraduate education.
Here is a rundown of my education at Harvard as an economics major:
– In my freshman year, I took Ec 10 along with a few hundred other students. Although the professor in charge of the course was renowned, the reality was that all the actual teaching was done by TA’s. Tenured professors gave occasional guest lectures in Memorial Hall about whatever subject interested them, and these lectures were out of context and generally irrelevant. My TA was a 23-year old first-year Harvard law school student who had just graduated with an undergraduate economics degree from Cornell. She was the de facto instructor tasked with teaching me and about 20 other freshman in her section. She had a tenuous grasp of the material herself, so she was a poor teacher. Who in their right mind would go to Harvard to be taught introductory micro- and macroeconomics by a newly minted Cornell BA?
–In my sophomore year, after declaring economics as my major, I took the required intermediate courses. Intermediate microeconomics was taught by an assistant professor trying to get tenure. She clearly viewed teaching as a thankless chore. She banned questions in the third lecture because she said they were slowing her down. She told students to go to the TA’s with any questions. There were a few good and a few lousy TA’s – generally, graduate students getting PhD’s in economics. Again, the only real way to learn the material was to closely read and reread the textbook.
–Intermediate macroeconomics was taught by a lecturer from a Japanese university who was on a year-long sabbatical at Harvard. He barely spoke English. About half the class simply stopped attending lectures because this professor’s English was impenetrable. This was another course where the primary resource was the textbook.
–Statistics was also taught by a lecturer on sabbatical from Japan. He also had a poor grasp of the English language, although he was more understandable than the intermediate macro professor. The course was surprisingly basic and provided little insight into statistics, let alone econometrics.
–My education was salvaged because I had to get a job in order to buy books, beer, food, etc. I ended up first working for a party planner at the Kennedy School of Government, was asked by a PhD student there if I knew how to use spreadsheets (I did), and then was drafted to help various other PhD students with spreadsheet and computer programming assignments. I eventually was drafted to work as a research assistant for a tenured professor at the Kennedy School, who also was a member of the NBER. She helped me to understand the practical uses of economics and statistics. If I had not stumbled upon this job, I would have learned very little about economics during my first few years at Harvard.
–Harvard provided very little formal academic advising. If you know what you want to do with your life when you enroll at Harvard or you have successful, professional parents who can provide you with counseling, this may not be a deficiency. But for a lot of students, the lack of advising makes Harvard’s undergraduate program seem too much like a random walk.
–Some years ago, when Larry Summers became Harvard’s president, he attempted an overhaul to improve the quality of undergraduate education there, which he thought was inadequate. The faculty of arts and sciences rose up in protest because he would have forced them to devote more of their time and resources to undergraduate teaching and advising and less to their own research interests. Summers’ comments about women in science gave the faculty the perfect pretext to finally win a vote of no confidence that forced him to resign. My understanding is that his replacement, Drew Gilpin Faust, keeps the status quo in place.
–My experience as an economics major at Harvard was hardly unique. Most of my friends majoring in economics had similar experiences and were equally critical of Harvard. Other majors, including the hard sciences and some of the relatively esoteric majors like anthropology or history and literature, provide much more direct contact with faculty. But economics is a very popular undergraduate major at Harvard.
In retrospect, the Harvard name opened doors for me in the early stages of my career thanks to the myth and the signal a Harvard diploma sends to employers. But in graduate school and then at different times in my career, I have had to become self-taught in subject matter that I should have learned as an undergraduate. In that regard, Harvard failed me. Having worked in finance for a while, I have observed that graduates from other colleges – not only Princeton and Yale, but those from smaller liberal arts colleges – were much better served by their alma maters than I was.
I had a pretty diferent experience for two reasons 1) I chose to be a comparative religion major - small and customized compared to doing the same stuff in the history department and 2) I am older than dirt. For the record I am now a business professor at a major university; long story but I didn’t end up impoverished or unrewarded in personal terms either.
You do make good points about having to be super proactive. Just avoid being an Econ major and you’ll be ok lol. Ec10 has been an annoyance for forty years, but the intro Econ class in every school is the same way. I don’t think I’d attribute it to Harvard. Same goes for cs50 I expect
Mankiw teaches EC10 and a lot of the students at Harvard think he is completely out to lunch. He is conservative economist who preaches many of the failed economic policies. I think EC 10 is more than an annoyance. It is a waste of time. CS50 is taught by David Malan. His ego is beyond huge. I don’t know that I would avoid CS50
This is so interesting - I remember my Economics profesor at North Texas (1970’s) telling us that we were getting a better education than an ivy league school because at NT professors were teaching the classes, not TA’s and professors had to write after class, not during. I didn’t really understand what he was talking about until my kids got into college and your story sounds like maybe he had a point!
Though many protest to the contrary, this is what I routinely have heard from H undergrads the last 10 years.
This is actually a cautionary tale about at large lecture classes at any number of universities. My daughter, graduated from Harvard in 2014 (humanities concentrator), and then completed a post-bac at The City College of New York (CCNY), a very large public university, for pre-med sciences (she was just accepted to med school!). One semester after receiving an “A” in a large Bio Chemistry lecture class, my daughter became a teaching fellow for that class. While it was the professor’s job to teach the classes, It was her responsibility to teach recitation (3 sections each week for which she received $1200 per section), going over the material taught in lecture, answering questions, giving/grading weekly quizzes and grading all mid-terms and finals. Basically the same thing TF’s / TA’s do at HYPSM. I see absolutely no difference between the experience my daughter (or the OP) had at a prestigious private institution vs her experience at a large public college. Students seeking personal attention from faculty members should consider smaller liberal arts colleges like Williams, Amherst, Pomona, etc and not large research universities.
I think it depends on the classes one takes. That said, much easier to get personal attention and develop a relationship in smaller classes. My D has just finished her first semester at Harvard. Her 60-level Spanish class had 12 students in it and she got to know the professor pretty well. Her freshman seminar also had around 14 students in it, and she loved it – and also got to know the professor and other students very well. For her math class, 1b, she basically saw the preceptor every day (she struggles with math), and again, has developed a good relationship with that preceptor. For her Lsa biology class, it was much larger than her other classes, but she made it a point to go to office hours, and she also made sure she took advantage of all the opportunities to get to know her profs in that class (for example, inviting them to the freshman dinner program at Hillel). I always tell my kid that developing the relationship with the prof is a big part of the college experience, and she has taken my advice to heart.
With respect to the thread title, this reflection from then candidate, now Massachusetts governor, Charlie Baker would seem apposite. When asked to take the Proust Questionnaire by the Boston Globe, he responded as follows:
Q: What is your greatest regret?
A: Not going to Hamilton College. I never really felt comfortable at Harvard.
I think what you need to remember is the exact reason why you felt lost at Harvard is why it is valued as such a wonderful institution and why employers value the students.
Nothing is handed (taught) to you at Harvard. One must learn how to teach themselves there with very little guidance. The help is available to you if you search it out and are diligent in your quest but it is not easily delivered to you. The skills you learned in searching for the answers is what makes the Harvard degree so valuable. You are at the highest school in the land and learning to be a self starter. Valuable skills that employers cherish.
I also agree with the other posters. Being taught by TA’s is typical to most large flagship state universities. And yes, many TA’s are foreign born and have English as a second language.
This is not unique to Harvard. Yale has similar issues and my experience there has led me to strongly caution my kids to attend LACs that emphasize teaching instead of big universities where the focus is more on research and getting tenure. (Yale and other schools give tenure rarely if ever and so the professors struggle and compete very hard for very tiny spoils.)
These things in the OP’s post at Harvard resonated with portions of my Yale experience–
- Big lecture classes with renowned professor;
- a TA actually doing the teaching in smaller sections;
- TAs often had strong accents (in econ class) or in other classes were newly minted BAs barely further along than the undergrads; TAs also did the grading;
- Conferences in office hours with professors were short and not all that productive;
- You graduate with little sense of career other than what you entered with, unless you have lots of outside help;
- The name of school opens doors and creates awe at cocktail parties, which means you need to hide where you went to school . . .
Wow MassDaD68… one does not have to pay $70k a year to be challenged to figure things out on one’s own. If this is how Harvard has modeled itself, it’s the scam of the century!
Presumably, the students (or more specifically their parents) are paying for education provided by top professors in their field, which according to the OP, they are not getting. So, I guess you’re paying for the “brand name”… (no surprise there.)
More employers seem to be realizing that top students from many colleges can add value to their workforce. I have heard comments to the effect that “non-Ivy” graduates do better in relating to diverse clients and collaborating with others. Obviously, that’s a limited view, but I found it interesting.
This is a problem that has been recognized at Harvard for many years. Almost a decade ago, Harvard put together a task force, which studied the issue, found that Harvard was doing a pretty mediocre job at teaching undergrads, and made some recommendations to improve the situation. The study got a lot of publicity. Here’s an article from the New York Times about it.
"CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 8 — Joshua Billings, 22, says he did not come to Harvard for the teaching.
“You’d be stupid if you came to Harvard for the teaching,” said Mr. Billings, who will graduate this spring and then go to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. “You go to a liberal arts college for the teaching. You come to Harvard to be around some of the greatest minds on earth.”
And that is pretty much how the thinking has gone here at Harvard for several decades. As one of the world’s most renowned research universities, Harvard is where academic superstars are continually expected to revolutionize their fields of knowledge. Cutting-edge research is emphasized, and recognized with tangible rewards: tenure, money, prestige, prizes, fame.
…
“It’s well known that there are many other colleges where students are much more satisfied with their academic experience,” said Paul Buttenwieser, a psychiatrist and author who is a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, and who favors the report. “Amherst is always pointed to. Harvard should be as great at teaching as Amherst.”
As Professor Skocpol put it, “People at Harvard are concerned when they hear that some of our undergraduates can go through four years here and not know a faculty member well enough to get a letter of recommendation.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/education/10harvard.html
Sounds like not much has changed at Harvard in the past 10 years, despite the task force recommendations.
My understanding is that this varies a lot at the elite schools, but Harvard might be the worst one for completely emphasizing research over teaching.
(First off, what is this “TA” business? Did the college rename them to TFs relatively recently?)
I’m Harvard c/o 2018, and I would say that, in general, my experience with the teaching here is quite positive. OP is right that the large lecture classes can be pretty bad (especially Ec10, which is why I avoided it), but they certainly don’t have to be! I just finished up Stat 110 (Introduction to Probability), the fourth-largest class in the college this semester, and it was wonderful. The instructor, Joe Blitzstein, was crystal-clear and engaging; he not only made tough, often non-intuitive concepts feel perfectly natural but also imparted an invaluable array of problem solving techniques (that I will surely use throughout my life). The textbook, written by Blitzstein himself, was a fantastic resource, and the weekly problem sets were tough but fair (and almost always interesting). I learned so much (and enjoyed myself in the process), and not once did I ever interact with the professor. My experience in SLS20 under Steven Pinker was the same (except in that case I went to his office hours a few times to chat–amazing conversations resulted). Ec10 is just about the worst large introductory class that Harvard has to offer, so I would be wary to generalize. Classes certainly get better and more intimate here as you progress up the ranks of your concentration. Also, Harvard has a nifty internal rating system allows you to easily avoid duds like Ec10; I’ve rarely been disappointed by my classes here. Of course, if you’re dead-set on Econ, you’ll have to take Ec10 (unless you opt out, same with CS50 for CS)–but it’s one class (and intro classes are frequently lackluster at almost every university).
Another cool experience: in Math 21a, multivariable calculus, all but one or two sections are taught by TFs. As it turns out, my TF was insanely good–in fact, the best math instructor I’ve ever had and one of the best teachers I’ve had at Harvard. Like minimus’ intermediate micro professor, he was on his way to a PhD, but my experience could not diverge more. Frequently, I would leave class and then rant to my friends at lunch about how unimaginably great my teacher was that day. It rocked.
And these are just the big courses. Other classes in which the teaching has exceeded my expectations: Expos20 (that’s right! there are actually a number of Expos20 classes that are legitimately great, and I was lucky to take one), Chinese Ba/Bb (holy crap is language instruction top-notch here), EAFM110 (an East Asian film and popular culture class), CS152 (Programming Languages, absolutely beautifully-run course), CS61 (Systems Programming–had the honor of taking a Margo Seltzer course; she is one awesome lady), USW36 (an innovation and entrepreneurship class taught at HBS that featured, like, 15 different uniformly-excellent guest lecturers), and SCRB187 (a neuro-ethics course taught by the inimitable Steven Hyman; my section TF was great, too). So, 11 out of the 20 courses I’ve taken have featured exceptional teaching. I can only think of one or two courses were lacking in this respect, and even those were far from terrible (I don’t regret taking either). The rest were solid to very good.
So, your mileage will vary. But I think it’s fairly easy to find incredibly well-taught courses here to take every semester. Barring a few middling concentration requirements, you have a whole lot of freedom to shop around and pick classes that you know you’ll like. I know I have.
My experience and my wife’s at Yale a zillion years ago were completely different from that described by the OP, but current and recent students we know generally (one exception) describe a college experience very much like ours.
Advising: The advising was great. My original advisor was a chaplain who tried to get me to commit to studying Chinese literature, something that I actually thought about some, and introduced me to high-quality Chinese food. I got a huge crush on a famous English professor attending a lecture series he was giving, went to his office hours, and asked him to be my advisor, which he then was for a couple years. When I declared a major (not English), my assigned departmental advisor was a really brilliant Classics professor). My wife’s departmental advisor in Psychology was Judith Rodin, later president of Penn.
Close relationships with faculty: I had relationships that felt close with a number of faculty, both famous (then) and not. Same for my wife, although in her case is was really 2-3 faculty members, while for me it was 5-6, including two well-known visiting faculty from other universities. I introduced one assistant professor to my mother, and they stayed friends for decades, long after the teacher had left Yale and become famous in his field.
TAs: I had great experiences with TAs, who did a lot to bridge the gap between me and faculty. The TAs whom I most respected went on to chair the English departments at Harvard and Yale, and the German department at Michigan. They were not chopped liver! The TA who was most important to my wife went on to become a significant public intellectual and a professor at a top law school.
Big lecture classes: Neither of us took a lot of big lecture classes, but the ones we did (mostly outside our main fields) were great – really interesting and engaging, decent (or more than decent) TAs. A number of the most popular lecture classes were so good that people would attend them without registering. I took three big lecture classes in my field; the TA in two were each the top grad student in his respective department (each of which was then considered the best in the world), and the third was a first-time experiment co-taught by two famous professors where all the sections but one were TA’ed by ladder faculty.
Seminars: Both of us were in the Directed Studies program, which gave us three seminars each semester with faculty freshman year. Apart from that, I had relatively intimate seminar classes with four top professors in my field, and one reading tutorial that a well-known visiting professor agreed to give me. Also a great seminar that was the first course taught by my favorite TA, and a number of other electives.
If you’re lucky enough to go to Harvard, try to take Psychology 1504. It’s a huge class (always with a wait list) but pretty darn great nonetheless.
I don’t think this topic is about Yale… enjoying the posts by current and recent students on their HARVARD experience.
First, the suggestion was made by many posters that Harvard is no different from Yale or Stanford (or, for that matter, Michigan) in this regard, and that if you don’t want the OP’s experience you have to go to a LAC. I don’t think that’s correct.
Second, while I do think that there are some differences between Harvard and Yale – say, in advising, and in the depth of some students’ outsized expectations – on the whole I agree that they are much more similar to one another than they are different. I am confident that the kind of experience I had at Yale is available at Harvard.
Just to give a comparison of an experience at a LAC: I have a D who is a sophomore economics major at Pomona. None of her economics classes has had more than 25 students in it. The professors are friendly and available and you can go to any professor’s office hours for help or just to chat about something you find interesting. Several times when D has done so, the professor talks for a while and then says “let’s continue this discussion at lunch” and they head over to the dining hall together. If you need additional help, you can also go to weekly mentoring sessions with TA’s (usually seniors in the department), or you can go to either the Student Writing Center (for essay help) or the Quantitative Skills Center for free tutoring on quantitative subjects which includes economics. D took Economic Statistics this past semester and will be doing research for the professor in the spring semester. To the extent there are any TA’s, they are just there to grade problem sets or help at mentoring sessions, never to do anything substantive in lecture classes.