<p>Former presidential candidate and US Senator George McGovern told the following story at John Kenneth Galbraith's funeral last week:</p>
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McGovern said that when his daughter was applying to colleges, he once asked Galbraith ``as a practical matter" what difference it would make if she attended Harvard rather than Wellesley.
Galbraith, according to McGovern, replied: ``Well, at Harvard, if you're lucky, you might get Galbraith once a week. At Wellesley, you might get one of my C-minus students three days a week."
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<p>One of Prof. Galbraith's distinguished younger colleagues in the Harvard economics department, Prof. Greg Mankiw, added some observations of his own:</p>
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The story is unfair to Wellesley, which has a good economics department. But if you change "C-minus" to "A-minus," Galbraith had things about right.</p>
<p>The most important choice a high-school senior faces when choosing where to be an undergrad is between research-oriented universities and teaching-oriented colleges. If you go to a place like Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, you get a famous faculty. But the first priority of that faculty is their own research and writing (and blogging!?), and they are more likely to shower attention on grad students than undergrads. If you go to a place like Amherst, Swarthmore, or Williams, you get a faculty whose first priority is undergraduate teaching. But you do not have a menu of graduate courses to sample from, and you do not have as vibrant a research atmosphere to experience. It is a tough choice.
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<p>Prof. Mankiw is in an interesting position to make observations on the Harvard undergraduate experience. Not only does he teach a very large core course (the intro economics class, which regularly enrolls 600+ students) but he and his wife audited another core course this semester (Stephen Pinker's Human Mind, with an enrollment of 300+ students). His own undergraduate education was at Princeton three decades ago.</p>
<p>Presumably neither Prof. Mankiw nor Prof. Galbraith has any direct personal experience with Wellesley.</p>