What will be the effect during the next 5 years?
who knows really. we ll have to wait and see. having a lot of money and making the best of it are two completely different things. in all honesty, with MIT right across the street and also Stanford being so far ahead of harvard in terms of STEM, i wonder how much Harvard can really do to bring its engineering department to a level that is consistent with the harvard name. i anticipate that it will help harvard engineering improve a few spots in the us news and other international engineering rankings but i highly doubt it is gonna cause it to crack the top 10, or tangibly change the perception people have of Harvard engineering. that would take def longer than five years.
^Just want to point out that STEM is not just engineering.
Yes, Stanford and MIT are far ahead of Harvard in traditional engineering (mechanical, chemical, civil, electrical/computer, etc).
But with regard to the “S” and “M” in STEM, Harvard is equal to MIT and Stanford in applied math, biology, biochemistry, chemistry, earth & planetary sciences, physics, mathematics & statistics, etc… and in astrophysics, Harvard > MIT >>> Stanford.
With the Paulson “gift”… it will be interesting to see if Harvard will attempt to match the traditional engineering disciplines, or instead try to leapfrog over them directly to 21st century engineering (nanotech, synthetic biology, etc)… my gut tells me that Stanford and MIT are so ridiculously far ahead in traditional engineering, that Harvard should just move on and focus on emerging tech… but can that be done? Is a foundation in traditional engineering needed? I honestly don’t know.