<p>I have vague aspirations of studying economics or poli sci and then going to law school. Other than that, however, I am not really looking for anything specific. Which should I choose?</p>
<p>Especially, which has a better social life?</p>
<p>Go visit both.</p>
<p>We wondered this twice over the past four years. With H kids who’ve visited Y, done a cappella at Y, and generally had a lot of close encounters with Y students, I’ve gotten the impression that there are probably not two more similar undergraduate schools in the country. Personally, I prefer H’s Cambridge location, and I prefer Y’s architecture. JFM’s suggestion is a good one.</p>
<p>From what I hear, (I’m a prospective student, Accepted Y, WL H) they’re extremely similar in terms of programs, and in terms of prestige, Harvard has the slight advantage.</p>
<p>However, I’ve also heard the atmospheres are extremely different. Harvard is considered distinctly more competitive, while Yale has a more relaxed atmosphere. The way I make sense of this is that kids in Harvard are naturally competitive and that is reflected in their studies. Yale is also competitive, but that is sort of channeled through the College system, which is, in my opinion, the most distinctive aspect of Yale.</p>
<p>They’re really similar in terms of programs, but it sounds to me like the atmosphere is different enough to set them apart definitively.</p>
<p>Oh, I should add a caveat to my suggestion. If you really want to know what life is like at both places, go visit on days that are NOT “Prefrosh Weekend” or “Bulldog Days.”</p>
<p>Or, at least view the visiting weekends with a grain of salt. Both places (although Yale to a greater degree, I hear) really roll out all of the stops/parties/concerts/booze for the visiting high schoolers.</p>
<p>"They’re really similar in terms of programs, but it sounds to me like the atmosphere is different enough to set them apart definitively. "</p>
<p>I think this is false. One way to think about it is to look at the number of people on this boxard who will be making the H vs. Y decision based on the fact that one admitted them and the other didn’t. There are tons of them. In other words, it’s almost eactly the same population. It’s the students that make the atmosphere, not the institution.</p>
<p>Hanna is both right and wrong on that. Yes, the student bodies are very, very similar – demographically and statistically they are probably identical. Yes, that means the character of both institutions is very similar, too, much more so than people pretend. But I think there are meaningful differences in institutional character, because there are meaningful differences in the demographically-indistinguishable students who apply to or decide to attend them.</p>
<p>First, although there is a large overlap in the two colleges’ applicant pools, it is not total, and the difference makes a difference. Remember, about 1/3 of Yale’s class comes from its EA acceptees, and many (maybe even most) of that group never applied to Harvard. And even in the RD pool, many people apply to one and not the other. Of the last five kids I know who went to Yale, only one even applied to Harvard, and Yale was her clear first choice. Of the last 9 kids I know who went to Harvard, only two DIDN’T apply to Yale. But out of 13 basically identical kids, only half applied to both colleges, and only a couple had their decisions made for them by only getting accepted at one when they might have gone to the other. The rest made an affirmative choice. And in that group, yes, the Harvard kids were somewhat more overtly competitive and prestige-oriented. Not all of them, and not all in the same ways. Or, put another way, out of that group of 13, I would only describe 5 as hypercompetitive and prestige-oriented, and four of them went to Harvard.</p>
<p>My tiny sample isn’t scientific at all, but I think it illustrates a real dynamic: Only a portion, nowhere near a majority, of the students at Harvard and Yale chose their college primarily because if its prestige. But the fraction of Harvard students who did that is meaningfully larger than the fraction of Yale students who did that, and it makes the atmosphere at Harvard a little more oppressive.</p>
<p>And, I should add, so what? If you have other good reasons to pick Harvard, the small difference there shouldn’t matter.</p>
<p>“the fraction of Harvard students who did that is meaningfully larger than the fraction of Yale students who did that, and it makes the atmosphere at Harvard a little more oppressive.”</p>
<p>I don’t see where you’ve offered any evidence of this. Yes, it’s true that few of the people picking Yale over Harvard are doing it because of prestige. But most of the people picking Yale aren’t doing it over Harvard – they’re doing it over Princeton, Penn, Columbia, etc., and prestige is playing a big role. And even the ones who ARE picking Yale over Harvard (having gotten into both) are clearly thinking a lot about prestige, because they surely got into other schools, too, but those schools didn’t make the final two.</p>
<p>This has been an irritant to me over the years…the idea that Yalies are just the kind of people who can put prestige to the side and are therefore deeper (or something) than people at Harvard. I mean, come on. Yale impresses the bejeezus out of everyone globally, just like Harvard. Perhaps this meme is a way for a small subset of Yalies to get all the prestige benefits of Harvard, and still get to congratulate themselves about how they are above worrying about prestige. (This is, in my data set, the reason that Yale is far more popular than Harvard for the top students at my self-consciously “progressive” private high school.)</p>
<p>My impression, filtered through the eyes of my H senior D, is that Y students put a lot more effort into trying to make sure people know they can party hard (or at least harder than those at H do). I think that fits with their efforts to appear more relaxed. The social scene at H seems more than ample for my highly social D, but she says her friends and acquaintances at Y seem very competitive towards H on that issue. She has no interest in that aspect of the H/Y rivalry. </p>
<p>I will say that “oppressive” is not a word that would ever find its way into my D’s list of adjectives to describe her experience at H. Not even a little.</p>