Harvard ends EA -- Says Program Hurts Disadvantaged

Colleges and Universities A-Z Harvard University
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<p>The point is that biggest does not equal best (as you well know).</p>

<p>Chewy does have a point, though, that endowment investment returns are generally higher the larger the endowment is. Last year, for example, Princeton's endowment increased by only 12.9%, UPenn's ($4B) endowment increased by 8.7%, and Brown's small ($2B) endowment increased by 11.9% ---while Harvard's increased by 15.0% and Yale's increased by 19.4%.</p>

<p>Over the most recent ten year period, University endowments have had the following return rates when grouped by size of endowment:</p>

<p>$25M or less: 7.9%
$26-50M: 8.3%
$51-100M: 8.7%
$101-500M: 9.3%
$501-1000M: 10.3%
$1000M (one billion) or above: 12.0%</p>

<p>Over the comparable time period, the S&P 500 Index increased by 9.9%.</p>

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<p>i <em>do</em> well know. but hey, if harvard's endowment per student is "not that impressive," then isn't yale's, which is a mere 1.7% higher according to COHE, "not that impressive" either?</p>

123

<p>Harvard's endowment is impressive, but not uniquely impressive as some people seem to think, especially seeing that Princeton and Yale have more dough per student.</p>

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<p>"LARGEST ENDOWMENTS PER STUDENT</p>

<p>Princeton $1.663 million
Yale $1.354 million
Harvard $1.331 million"</p>

<p>Where did these numbers come from? The numerators we all know, Harvard's endowment is nearly twice as much as Yale's.</p>

<p>The denominator is where the fudging starts. Is it really meaningful to divide by the number of students in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Divinity, Public Health, Design, Business (nearly 1000 per class), Law (nearly 600 per class), etc. etc. when each of Harvard's School has independent finances and can't touch anyone else's? This is so-called "every tub on its own bottom" policy at Harvard.</p>

<p>So Harvard has huge graduate schools but does it follow that the endowment money is really spread out to take care of all these graduate students? Not really. Most graduate students get funded by grants from the government and foundations. Graduate students do not need as much money from the University in terms of housing, support for extracurricular activities, etc.etc. Among the Harvard Schools, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has by far the largest endowment and most of that money is spent on undergraduates.</p>

<p>Simply diving the endowment by the number of students is like dividing the number of books in the library by the number of students and saying that Harvard has far inferior library than Yale and Princeton. In reality, what matters is whether you can spent large sums of money on new initiatives, expensive projects, recruitment of star faculty, etc. and Harvard's power is unsurpassed here. </p>

<p>Why is Harvard the only school that can eliminate parental contribution from everybody whose parents make under 60,000? If Yale and Princeton has more resources per student, why can't they match Harvard? Why is Harvard the school with the highest average faculty salary in the Ivy League, $ 15,000-40,000 more than Yale and Princeton? Answer these questions, please.</p>

125

<p>Every school has an "every tub on its own bottom" policy. Harvard is a great school, I was simply saying that its endowment, in terms of The Coalition of Higher Education's endowment per student measure, is not as singluarly as impressive as some other posters thought. </p>

<p>Harvard's faculty salaries are in fact slightly higher because the cost of living in Boston is significantly higher than it is in smaller cities, therefore it simply needs to pay more in order to be competitive in attracting faculty with other prestigious schools in less-expensive areas (which, incidentally, reduces the amount of money it can then spend on undergraduates -- if you took endowment per student adjusted to the cost of living, Harvard would fall even lower than Yale or Princeton than it already is!)</p>

<p>Going back to the spending per student measure, COHE and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, U.S. Dept. of Education, have another measure called student services spending per student - this includes spending on undergraduate advising, teaching, health services, career guidance/counseling, fellowships, and the like. By this measure, Caltech has the highest spending per student among Class I Research Universities, followed closely by Yale, and then, at a distance, Cornell's Arts & Science Colleges, then Princeton (Swarthmore spends even more than Caltech, but it is not considered a university). Harvard spends about 20-30% less per student than any of these three. Still much better than, say, UPenn, which spends only $923 per student for every $3060 spent by Caltech, but again, not as much as some people seem to think.</p>

126

<p>collegeparent: What I meant by "objective criteria" was something exactly the opposite of what you said. Who cares what schools come to YOUR mind? The following are some examples of "objective criteria".</p>

<ol>
<li><p>membership in National Academy of Sciences 2006
Harvard 164
Berkeley 126
Stanford 125
MIT 106
Princeton 70
Caltech 68
UCSD 63
Yale 62
Chicago 41
Columbia 41
Cornell 39
Penn 35
UCLA 32
UCSF 31
Michigan 27
Duke 19
Brown 10
Dartmouth 2
( Harvard just added another 6 members for a total of 170 )</p></li>
<li><p>PubMed search for papers in Nature:
Harvard: 696 papers
Yale: 215
Princeton: 132
Stanford: 319</p></li>
<li><p>PubMed Search for papers in Science and Nature over the past year:
Harvard: 124
Berkeley: 64
Stanford: 46
MIT: 40
Yale: 34
Princeton: 25</p></li>
<li><p>Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT (scores normalized to Harvard)
Alumni Nobel Prizes – 100, 52, 63, 41, 74
Faculty Nobel Prizes – 100, 45, 77, 72, 81
Highly Cited Researchers – 100, 60, 61, 89, 67
Nature and Science – 100, 58, 49, 71, 66
Citation Impact – 100, 64, 49, 72, 65
<a href="http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2005/ARWU2005_Top100.htm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2005/ARWU2005_Top100.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li>
</ol>

127

<ol>
<li>NIH grants in year 2004 </li>
</ol>

<p>Harvard 1,310,749,000
Yale 323,614,000
Princeton 38,329,000
Stanford 301,734,000</p>

<p>The figures include the money given to the teaching hospitals. Princeton doesn't have a medical school, which is why it's figure is so small.</p>

128

<p>Yup, I agree: unnamed friends of friends should stear clear of Harvard. Anecdotes are weak and can be disputed, but threads like this (which are too common on CC!) always manage to find plenty to dispute about any statistics which are cited too. I only meant to say that it is my perception, agree or not, that in the past almost no student would have been "crazy" enough to turn down an offer of admission from Harvard. It was head and shoulders above the rest. Now, due to bad publicity about undergraduate life and the lessoning of the gap between Harvard and its competitors, more students are prepared to say "no" if there's another school they like more for reasons of fit.</p>

129

<p>Now it's your turn. Where is the "objective evidence" that Harvard has been " eclipsed by MIT, Stanford, Washington U, CalTech, Berkeley and JHU"???</p>

<p>Your opinion doesn't count. Surveys don't count.</p>

130

<p>COHE can say whatever it wants, but I'm calling the figures bull**** if they are dividing by the number of Harvard Graduate School of Design, Divinity, Business, etc.etc. and calling that a reflection of how much is spent per undergraduate student.</p>

<p>Divide by the number of undergraduates and Harvard will surge ahead of everyone.</p>

131

<p>I doubt that, given that places like Caltech -- which is already so far ahead of Harvard in SSE expenditure, just like Princeton and Yale -- have even more graduate students per undergraduate than Harvard.</p>

<p>Also, Harvard hasn't been "eclipsed" by anyone. But places like Yale now get far more applications per spot in the class than Harvard. Harvard undergrad gets about 13 apps per spot; Harvard Law gets about 14. Meanwhile, Yale undergrad gets about 16 apps per spot and Yale Law gets about 25. 90% of YLS admits choose to attend Yale; less than 60% of HLS admits choose to attend Harvard. Obviously these things combined with Harvard's recent decline in selectivity relative to other top schools that I explained above at the undergraduate level (e.g., the precipitous drop in Harvard's market share of NMSC Merit Scholars) says something.</p>

132

<p>Give me the numbers and the source, otherwise I don't believe.</p>

<p>Who cares if Yale gets more applications? Less than 70% accepted their offers and Yale had to get tons of students off the waiting list. </p>

<p>This is despite Yale's SCEA, which is an attempt to avoid sharing the applicant pool with Harvard.</p>

133

<p>You could easily look at that the other way around, given that Yale has been more selective for two of the past three years, has more NMSC-sponsored Merit Scholars as a percentage of its incoming class, and produced more than three times as many Rhodes and Marshall scholars as Harvard last year. The vast majority of students at Yale never applied to Harvard - because their interest in going there was less than the application fee.</p>

134

<p>PosterX my dear friend, your argument has been repeated dozens of times here and has been rebutted by others, also probably dozens of times. So I will not address this.</p>

<p>Rather, I'm still waiting for collegeparent to come up with his "objective evidence".</p>

<p>No "objective evidence"? Oh well. At least that shut you up.</p>

135

<p>The term "objective criteria" is yours, ske293. And you presented it to your satisfaction. As for getting engaged in a p***ing contest, it's not my style. However, Harvard is being eclipsed by other schools which, as mentioned earlier, have risen up to and in some cases exceeded the Crimson standard. I stand by Harvard resting on its laurels of age, money, power and hubris as others pass them by. E.g., Stanford two new campuses (Science & Engineering Quad #2 and Graduate School of Business) will be up and running while Harvard continues its land-grab and zoning battles in Allston. The eclipse? It is here, but what are its effects? It is too soon to tell.</p>

136

<p>"Harvard is being eclipsed by other schools...."</p>

<p>The way you structure the comparison is totally unfair. You make it Harvard vs. an "all star team" selected from units and departments of many different schools. That's hardly cricket. Sure there is excellence elsewhere, but if you look at Harvard's strengths OVERALL relative to those of any other single school in the country, Harvard does pretty well, thank you.</p>

137

<p>That's not an arguement, Leon -- Harvard, especially four of its graduate schools, are definitely competitive with other such schools at the very top of the game. However, in others, e.g. engineering, it is not. And various of its undergraduate programs are just as competitive with those at other schools. In this increasingly diversified and fragmented world of American education, some schools will be better than others at some things, but the dominion of one school being all things to all students has passed. There are simply too many exceptional students who cannot be admitted to just one institution, as is proven year after year. And there are simply too many exceptional schools for those students. It becomes a question of "the right fit." Know of one student who was accepted at Yale, Stanford and Princeton but declined to even apply to Harvard because the moment she looked at the Yard, "you'll never find me here. I hate this place. I would never go here." And left campus before even touring it. She was also a legacy (hint: an ancestor built the library) so would've been admitted. </p>

<p>But to get back on-topic, you're right. Yes, there is an all-star team (nice example, BTW) and it includes Harvard as part of that team. Other team members, depending on school/program/faculty/facilities, could come from 20 other schools. And that is precisely the point. Thank you, Leon, for getting to the crux. Harvard does not stand alone or above any other school but is part of a very strong educational team that includes at least 20 other schools as members. </p>

<p>Now, if you really want to start a ruckus, while there'll be little arguement over the top 10, but for the next 10, there'll be some feathers flying. BTW, such classifications should be on a horizontal, not vertical, plane so as not to rank equally comparable schools. It's one reason why secondary schools are abolishing class ranks, but that's another thread for another forum.</p>

138

<p>Harvard DOES stand above all others because while others may come close to Harvard in some areas, NONE matches its overall breadth and depth. I think THAT'S the point that Leon was trying to make.</p>

<p>Your argument that Harvard has been surpassed by others is apparently based on the single example of a teenager girl (assuming she really exists) who was too intimidated to apply to Harvard but felt more comfortable with the next tier. How pathetic.</p>

<p>Also, I'm not so sure if she would have been admitted automatically simply because her ancestors built the library. Legacies do get in at a higher rate, but it also has to do with the fact that they are fairly smart, which may in turn have something to do with the fact that one of their parents went to Harvard. The majority of the legacies in fact get rejected, as is the case with any another subgroup.</p>

139

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<p>not necessarily. all of harvard's peers are also spending "large sums of money" improving themselves. and they're not all running budget deficits like harvard.</p>

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<p>my turn: why is princeton the only school, five years after its initial announcement, that can eliminate all loans so that its students can and do graduate debt-free? if harvard has a bigger endowment, why can't it still match princeton?</p>

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<p>well, for one, harvard's average faculty salaray is not $15,000 more than princeton's, unless of course you include harvard's higher-paid professional school faculty (bus, law, med).</p>

140

<p>All in all, Harvard is a great school that is a great match for some people, and for some, it's not. That is all. If it were truly the "best" school in ALL possible respects in the human imagination, then Harvard would have a 100% yield on its accepted students. It does not. Nor does Yale, Princeton, and all the other highly-regarded schools in this nation.</p>