<p>I don't know why everyone beats up on Harvard. It is what it is. Strengths and weaknesses. </p>
<p>Faculty interaction with undergrads is not one of its strengths. So what? As Larry Summers reportedly told two undergrads ... if you wanted to get to know your professors, you should have gone to Amherst or Swarthmore. Conversely, if you want eight million courses offered every semester or the ability to be entertained by a "big name" professor in a lecture auditorium, Amherst and Swarthmore can't offer that. It's not like any of this is a big shock. I'm sure that students smart enough to get into Harvard are smart enough to figure that out.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I don't know why everyone beats up on Harvard. It is what it is. Strengths and weaknesses.
[/quote]
It is what it is, but it could be better. Like it or not, Harvard sets an example for most other private and state universities nationwide. </p>
<p>If Harvard announces that undergraduate education is important, and announces concrete steps to improve it (e.g. lowering class sizes, rewarding good teachers, replacing grad students and adjuncts in the classroom with tenure-track profs), then other universities nationwide will think seriously about following suit. Harvard is a leader, and has the power to start a trend. </p>
<p>If you believe that the quality of undergraduate instruction in the US should be improved, then Harvard would be the best possible place to start.</p>
<p>
[quote]
If you believe that the overall quality of undergraduate instruction in the US should be improved, then Harvard would be the best possible place to start.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Not really. It's an R1 research university. Undergrad education is just one relatively small part of what Harvard does. That's not what they are "selling". They are "selling" the incredible resources of a large R1 university. </p>
<p>Harvard is not serious about offering a boutique-style undergrad education. If they were, they wouldn't be contemplating yet another large increase in undergrad enrollment. That's OK. I don't know many boutique LACs that are serious about offering the vast array of resources that Harvard can offer.</p>
<p>Any consumer who wishes to make an informed choice based on personal preference should have no trouble figuring it out. If a consumer doesn't care enough to figure out the differences, then who loses?</p>
<p>BTW, I think Harvard is the WORST place to start any conversation about any higher education topic. Why? Because Harvard is such an outlier, by any standard, that it is largely irrelevant to a broad discussion of higher education. Example: Take the general premise that it is difficult to hire qualified minority candidates for tenure track positions. True...but not at Harvard. That endowment means that, if there were only five qualified minority professors in the world, Harvard would have no trouble hiring them if they wanted to.</p>
<p>
[quote]
And, just so you don't think it's just a bunch of art history PhDs, here's the top 60 getting PhDs in Science, Math, and Engineering,
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The more valid comparison would be PhD's attained at top 4 schools in the field, or NSF graduate fellowships. You also need to consider combined PhD + MD rate as there is some competition between those for biology students (biomedical engineering was reported as the number one major at MIT recently); admission to med school favors those who attend Harvard, MIT and their direct competitors. The PhD rate at top research universities schools is also reduced by the option for science graduates to work in consulting or on Wall Street, which give a large recruiting advantage to HYPMSC over the liberal arts schools.</p>
<p>I expect that the performance of LACs would still be good taking all that into account, but there would be fewer instances of LACs outranking alpha-dog research schools.</p>
<p>"Anecdotal experience won't take us very far either way."</p>
<p>I was responding to a particular post suggesting that the time to go to Harvard and interact with professors is during graduate school, not undergrad. There are no "outcome data" or surveys that I'm aware of asking people who've attended a single university for both undergrad and grad to compare the two experiences. Anecdotal evidence is all we've got.</p>
<p>The PhD stats suggest pretty strongly that lots of undergraduate institutions of various types are doing a good job of preparing their students for PhD studies.</p>
<p>COFHE itself has stated that its surveys are intended to provide internal data to each school. But even if you want to take COFHE as gospel, it has never suggested any pattern of higher student satisfaction at LACs versus research universities. (By the way, the differences we're talking about are around a quarter of a point on a five-point scale; about 7% of Harvard seniors said they were dissatisfied, compared to an average of around 5%.)</p>
<p>"If Harvard announces that undergraduate education is important, and announces concrete steps to improve it"</p>
<p>Harvard is always subject to disproportionate scrutiny. Them's the breaks. When Harvard says, "We need to improve XYZ," the message in the headlines is "XYZ currently sucks at Harvard."</p>
<p>I'll never forget that when Harvard SWITCHED BRANDS OF TOILET PAPER my junior year, it made the AP wire. <a href="http://www.thisistrue.com/sheepskin_5835.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.thisistrue.com/sheepskin_5835.html</a> The actual articles aren't online any more, but the general gist was that the spoiled rich kids at Harvard had demanded 2-ply paper for their delicate sissy behinds. So yeah, it's no surprise this program gets an unwarranted level of scrutiny. If Harvard weren't making any changes, then we'd have headlines about how it's too old and crusty to innovate (heck, sometimes you see those simultaneously).</p>
<p>
[quote]
Harvard is such an outlier, by any standard, that it is largely irrelevant to a broad discussion of higher education. Example: Take the general premise that it is difficult to hire qualified minority candidates for tenure track positions. True...but not at Harvard. That endowment means that, if there were only five qualified minority professors in the world, Harvard would have no trouble hiring them if they wanted to.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Harvard is not such an outlier on its own, but may be one when aggregated with the other schools having comparably massive investment funds. It is not true that all or even most of the best professors want to work at Harvard and would go there if offered a position, including many who are at much lower ranked state schools. Distribution of top scholars among universities is more even than the distribution of top students.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The more valid comparison would be PhD's attained at top 4 schools in the field
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Valid for what? Certainly not for choosing a college. Any high school senior who picks a college banking on getting accepted into a top-4 med school or top-4 PhD program four years down the road has a screw loose. Those admissions require being in the top few percent of your graduating class. That is simply not a predictable result -- not at Harvard. Not at any top LAC. Not at any top school. Heck, it's not even predictable that high school senior sure about med school will even complete the pre-med program and apply to med school. I believe the majority do not.</p>
<p>But, anyway, if you would like to assemble PhD production lists for the most recent ten year period, limiting it to the top four programs in each field, be my guest. I'm sure that everyone will be waiting to see your results.</p>
<p>
[quote]
It is not true that all or even most of the best professors want to work at Harvard and would go there if offered a position, including many who are at much lower ranked state schools.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>They would at some price. It's just a salary negotiation that Harvard can win....if it wants to.</p>
<p>I know 3 professors who were offered jobs at Harvard but did not want to leave their current university positions. Sometimes the $ and prestige don't draw faculty into the Harvard orbit.</p>
<p>momfromme...
At my wife's LAC, not at all top tier, SEVERAL students announced that they had gotten into Harvard or Yale, but decided not to attend. The most common reason was the "snobs" at those places.
I have to believe that that college profs with a whiff of an idea that they might be offered a position at Harvard have no trouble "morphing" this into a job offer.</p>
<p>The application process for teaching jobs at places like Harvard are a feeling out process. Offers are seldom made unless there was fairly clear assurance from the applicant that the offer would be accepted.
I would tend to have little respect for someone who actually got to the point of "turning down Harvard".</p>
<p>
[quote]
BTW, I think Harvard is the WORST place to start any conversation about any higher education topic. Why? Because Harvard is such an outlier, by any standard, that it is largely irrelevant to a broad discussion of higher education.
[/quote]
Harvard is certainly an outlier by most standards, but not by every standard, and that's the point. For example, the current national standard for undergraduate teaching includes large classes, a weak commitment to teaching, and substitution of grad students and adjuncts for tenure-track faculty. Harvard, for better or worse, is not an outlier in these respects. The LACs are the outliers.</p>
<p>Obviously Harvard has other, compensatory advantages; I don't doubt that many in the Harvard community are perfectly satisfied with the current tradeoffs. But the NY Times article that initiated this thread clearly implies that President Bok, Dean Skocpol, et al. are not satisfied; they apparently believe that Harvard could do better. I think they may be right.</p>
[quote]
It is not true that all or even most of the best professors want to work at Harvard and would go there if offered a position, including many who are at much lower ranked state schools.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>They would at some price. It's just a salary negotiation that Harvard can win....if it wants to.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>That is true of any school. Your point was that Harvard is an "outlier" in its ability to win hiring battles. It is not particularly an outlier in the ability to hire any one superstar or even several superstars to invigorate a given program. Across the whole school and in the overall level of the faculty, of course mega-endowments show their effect, but there too Harvard is not in a league of its own. It plays in the same league as its leading competitors: MIT, Princeton, etc. Those upper-elite research schools may qualify as one large outlier compared to all the others, but even that is not clear.</p>
<p>
[quote]
"The more valid comparison would be PhD's attained at top 4 schools in the field" </p>
<p>Valid for what? Certainly not for choosing a college.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>If 75 percent of an LAC's graduates earn PhD's from Lower Podunk State College, while only 45 percent of Harvard graduates get doctorates from MIT, Berkeley, and Harvard Medical School, then ranking the LAC higher based on numerical PhD production is a crock.</p>
<p>The high PhD numbers for LAC grads are not uninformative, nor are they occuring at programs that are a joke. But those numbers are not comparing like to like unless the PhD's granted are sorted by level of institution.</p>
<p>
[quote]
But those numbers are not comparing like to like unless the PhD's granted are sorted by level of institution.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Be my guest. The NSF data base is available on line with every PhD granted in the United States since 1920. </p>
<p>You might want to start by simply looking at the grad schools were students from top LACs are getting their degrees Here's the list of most popular grad schools for recent graduates provided to USNEWS by Swarthmore. I think this is order from most popular to least popular and it includes all grad school (PhD, MD, Law, etc.)</p>
<p>U. C. Berkeley
Univ. of Chicago
Harvard
M. I. T.
Univ. of Michigan
Univ. of Pennsylvania
Princeton
Stanford
Oxford
Duke
Columbia
Cornell
Yale
University of Wisconsin
Johns Hopkins
Northwestern
London School of Economics </p>
<p>Not every college or university provides this data.</p>
<p>"Go back to your professor friends and ask them what they would have done if Harvard had doubled the offer...."</p>
<p>Depending on the offer, and where they are currently living, doubling the offer might still not be enough to make them whole financially.</p>
<p>If you have to pay an additional $700,000 to get comparable housing to what you have now - plus triple for utilities and insurance and 50% more for everything else- making this investment in a housing market who's future return prospects are quite uncertain- the salary differential may indeed need to be huge to justify a move to Boston area.</p>
<ul>
<li>Speaking as someone who lived this same experience quite recently, moving to NY from the midwest.</li>
</ul>
<p>
[quote]
Be my guest. The NSF data base is available on line with every PhD granted in the United States since 1920.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>So you don't contest the methodological point, claim that it makes no empirical difference anyway (a correct analysis would reach the same conclusion), are waiting for somebody else to produce data that would confirm or refute the claim, and want credit for being right in the meantime?</p>
<p>Taking a quick look at Swarthmore's web site, there is a more basic flaw with the statistics: considering science and engineering PhDs per student in those concentrations the numbers at Harvard, MIT etc rise and some of the numbers at Swarthmore drop. Swarthmore lists, for example, 25 math majors and minors but one PhD recipient (in math) last year. At Harvard the ratio would be a lot higher. The discrepancies are similar but less extreme in other areas. In science (less so engineering) the PhD rates are high at the research schools as those majors attract grad-school oriented students, with the schoolwide rate lowered by majors like English, economics, sociology. You can't assume that undergrad major and PhD are always the same, but it gives some indication nonetheless.</p>
<p>
[quote]
So you don't contest the methodological point, claim that it makes no empirical difference anyway (a correct analysis would reach the same conclusion), are waiting for somebody else to produce data that would confirm or refute the claim, and want credit for being right in the meantime?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>No. I'm just chuckling at the thought of you digging through the NSF database trying to find out not only how many PhDs were earned over a 10 year period by graduates of each of 4000 colleges and universities, but then adding rows to your spreadsheet listing each school where the PhDs were obtained by graduates of each college. And, then how in the world you would evaluate that without knowing, for example, the top 20 PhD programs in Sociology. Or Chemistry. Or Linguistics. Or Electrical Engineering. Or the three dozen or so fields of study in the NSF database.</p>
<p>I have a pretty good idea of what you are up against. I'm not sure that you do. Here's your starting point for the NSF database, though:</p>
<p>Frankly, that seems more like the kind of research you would do once you have your list whittled down to two or three schools for comparison. If you are lucky, maybe those schools already provide the information.</p>
<p>I'm also chuckling that you seem to think PhD completions is, in and of itself, a qualitative ranking system. It's not. It's more descriptive of colleges and departments and students. </p>
<p>I posted the data here because someone said that LAC grads "seemed" to be at a disadvantage in grad school placements and completions. The data clearly shows that is not the case.</p>