<p>Addittion to last post:</p>
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<blockquote> <p>If your premise to assert that Harvard does not provide excellent math and science undergraduate education, you will fail. It is among the top schools in the world. <<</p> </blockquote>
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<p>This is a blanket statement that is not completely true. Harvard is not ranked #1 in all the pure science departments of the country. This would depend on the science.</p>
<p>According to the rankings from the National Research Council (NRC) several years ago, Harvard only ranked #3 in the Biological Sciences, with #1 Stanford, #2 MIT, #3 Harvard, #4 UC San Diego, #5 UC Berkeley. Cornell is the top Ivy ranked in Enginnering with Princeton, a close 2nd in the Ivies. Harvard's Engineering does not rank in the top 30 in the country and even ranks below Columbia. Harvard's Engineering, of course, ranks below Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, and Caltech.</p>
<p>Harvard can't claim to be the "jack of all trades" and it isn't.</p>
<p>Prof John Nash, the Nobel in Economics of "A Beautiful Mind" fame, and Princeton Professor in Economics, turned down Harvard for the study of his PhD in pure Math, in favor of Princeton, because he thought that Princeton had a better Math department at the time, populated by the world's greatest mathematicians. He also receivied financial aid from Princeton, which he didn't receive at Harvard. Please read the book by Sylvia Nasar.</p>
<p>Harvard is not the top school in the world in Applied Math, Applied Sciences and Engineering, or Computer Sciences. Many others rank above Harvard in these fields, notably MIT, CalTech, and UC Berkeley and many others, and even Carnegie-Mellon in Computer Science.</p>
<p>In the Medical Sciences and Physiology, the Harvard Medical School is arguably the best in the world by a huge margin. The HMS receives over $700 million a year from government sources alone, mainly from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in support of the research done at the HMS and its affliliated hospitals for the teaching of its students, interns, residents and post-grad fellows and for research done by the faculty. No other medical school comes close in the amount of dollars in funding.</p>