<p>[exerpt from long June 7, 2005 article in USA Today on the magic of the Harvard 'brand name."]</p>
<p>"There isn't any doubt that brand matters and that Harvard is the prestige brand," says Stanley Katz, director of Princeton University's Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies. "It's the Gucci of higher education, the most selective place."</p>
<p>"It used to be the case that of students who were admitted to Harvard and Princeton or Harvard and Yale, seven of 10 would choose to go to Harvard," Katz says. "It may be more now. There is a tendency for the academically best to skew even more to Harvard. We just get our socks beat off in those cases."</p>
<p>The interesting part of this article is not the cross-admit data so much as the stories from the 1980 grads about whether they thought it was worth it.</p>
<p>I thought the reference to Gucci was telling. Does anyone buy a $500 Gucci bag because they perceive it as a great value. No! They buy it because it confers some kind of status or message to people seeing it on their arm. A handmade Pierotucci bag may be of much higher quality but it does not have the name recognition which screams, "Look at me!!"</p>
<p>While Harvard is a great university, does anyone really believe that it offers a measurably better education than P'ton, Amherst, Yale, JHU or any number of other great colleges?</p>
<p>"While Harvard is a great university, does anyone really believe that it offers a measurably better education than P'ton, Amherst, Yale, JHU or any number of other great colleges?"</p>
<p>of course not, but it still provides a slight edge in terms of getting hired the same way that an URM gets a slight edge in college admissions.</p>
<p>Is there any evidence that being a Harvard grad improves employment opportunities? With all the stories of grade inflation at Harvard, I know of businesses that do not regard a Harvard degree as highly as it once was.</p>
<p>... but the fact that - year after year - Harvard has its pick of the best students, including many of those ardently courted by its "rivals," does indeed make Harvard a "better school" in the eyes of each succeeding generation of academic superstars. </p>
<p>Moreover, the quality of the students helps to attact a high quality faculty, just as the size of the endowment helps to ensure matchless physical resources.</p>
<p>again, in this case we have to look at who is doing the hiring. Most of these personell managers will have graduated at a time when a harvard education was top and there were very few schools comparable to it. </p>
<p>With the recent democratization of so many highly-qualified applicants applying to selective schools and thus raising the student body quality, the case is no longer true. A Hahvahd education is not a golden key anymore. In the modern economy, increasingly, one's advancement is more due to merit than to where he/she graduated from.</p>
<p>I was so interested to see this story because as a marketing person I have been thinking along the same lines. This is an example of solid theory in one discipline illuminating problems in another discipline.</p>
<p>We are in an era where an unprecedented amount of information about goods we purchase is available to consumers. One would assume that this information would leave brands less valuable. After all, brands are icons with magic powers that assure you that what you are buying will be good. You'd think they have more power when information is limited. Turns out that this overwhelm of information actually leaves consumers less sure of what actually differentiates goods. Hence, brand obsession.</p>
<p>We are also in an era in America when luxury is being redefined. Information about luxury goods themselves used to be hard to come by. As a result, luxury was in the eye or the hand of the beholder. With so much luxury now on display, the producers of luxury goods are having to up the stakes. Luxury is now defined as primarily that which is hard to come by and identifiably expense, eclipsing the traditional criteria: that which is beautiful or softest or stronger or shinier. You see it everywhere.</p>
<p>So Harvard is the brand of college luxury. We can now find out so much about colleges that we cannot decide which one is best. So people default to what they perceive as the #1 brand. And, in a culture that values conspicuous display of luxury, the brand that matters to those who are outwardly focused is always that brand that is the most difficult to come by and most valued in the public perception.</p>
<p>Your own family experience helps prove the point; with so much riding on the choice, and with tuition etc now north of $40,000, why not strive for the best?</p>
<p>I don't want to rain on the fashion parade, but has anyone considered the Asian factor? The group most likely to not turn Harvard down is Asian. (It said so, right in Harvard's own admissions packet. Harvard uses this fact in calculating its likely yield.) And, Harvard is admitting more and more Asian students. I'm not saying this is to increase their yield -- Harvard doesn't have to engage in such petty concerns. They're admitting great students, an increasing number of them Asian. I'm just guessing that the Harvard "brand" in the Asian community may account for the "apparently growing" cross-admit edge.</p>
<p>Anecdotal evidence: When we let our kid turn the place down for a little known university in New York City, one of my husband's Asian colleagues shook his head and told him: "If my kids get into Harvard, they're going to Harvard."</p>
<p>But you know what, it's not Harvard, it's Byerly. Lots of perfectly nice people go to school there and teach there. And perfectly intelligent and all that. So I will bow out of this discussion.</p>