<p>You’re all wrong. Harvard got its reputation by being named the number 1 college in Colony News & Empire Report’s, Best Colleges in The Colonies, (1710 Edition). They’ve been coasting ever since.</p>
<p>The question isn’t how did Harvard get to be known by a few eggheads in academia…it’s how did it come to be known and respected by just about every person in the country. Part of that has to do with it being a department store where you can get just about anything of the highest quality. A small boutique, even if it’s selling stuff that is of comparable quality, will never get as famous and be known far and wide. In your 21st Century minds, “huge universities” = “mediocre universities.” But I think if you go back to the 18th and 19th Centuries, when Harvard became the household name it is today, big universities tended to extremely good universities.</p>
<p>I thought bclintonk’s post above pretty much nailed the most important factors. Lost in all of the Karabell hoo-ha is the fact that Harvard under President Eliot was the first of the traditional establishment universities to adopt a meritocracy approach, even if it wasn’t an absolute value, and that had a whole heck of a lot to do with Harvard’s prominence in the mid-20th Century.</p>
<p>A couple of other factors play in, too:</p>
<ol>
<li> Real estate. Over the past 50 years, urban and suburban universities have consistently gained in prestige as a group, and rural universities declined. But in the 70s and 80s some of the “very urban” universities were harmed terribly – especially insofar as the attractiveness of their undergraduate programs was concerned – by the free-fall that was going in their neighborhoods. Places like Hopkins, Chicago, Columbia, Penn really got kicked in the teeth by that, and it sure didn’t help Yale. (When I was looking at college in the mid-70s, Columbia and Penn were seen as far less desirable than Cornell and Dartmouth, for just this reason. And I was a city kid.) Harvard was hardly immune to the problem, but Cambridge in general, and especially the part around Harvard, maintained its general desirability. (Some of that was due to canny real estate investing by Harvard, of course.)<br></li>
</ol>
<p>The bottom line was that Harvard had the real estate sweet spot – a vibrant, non-depressed neighborhood in a vibrant city. Other universities had similar advantages – Brown, NYU, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Emory, Rice – and, guess what?, all of them had major advances in prestige over the past 50 years. But Harvard started out way ahead of them.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Until recently, there really weren’t many, if any, truly national universities. Harvard has always had a special mission to New England, but it was one of a handful of universities that really tried to be national institutions long before that became common.</p></li>
<li><p>Schmaltz raises a good point about Harvard’s brand recognition on the street, not just in elitist circles. A lot of that has to do with Hollywood (and to the very strong Lampoon-Crimson-Hollywood pipeline). Love Story, The Paper Chase, Harvard Man . . . there has been a drumbeat of promotion for Harvard for decades, far more than for any other college (although Stanford gets its share now, and Yale and Princeton get tastes). Rory Gillmore may have gone to Yale – she had to if they didn’t want to get all new sets – but she spent four years talking about how Harvard was the bestest. JFK’s glamor also contributed to the Harvard mystique. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>The point is that Harvard has been the clear winner in the pop culture arena over the past generation. The Teamsters I worked with in my midwestern city in 1975 had no idea what Yale OR Harvard were. Today, I’m certain their kids know what Harvard stands for.</p>
<ol>
<li> And you can’t underestimate the importance of the still-gargantuan, unprecedented-in-the-history-of-the-world endowment, which doesn’t even take into account the incredible value of its tangible and real estate capital in service.</li>
</ol>
<p>what the hell? we’ve been moved to Harvardland!</p>
<p>Man the lifeboats!! Women, children, and state college grads first!!</p>
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<p>Not sure that is true, or at least there are many exceptions. Williams, Amherst, Dartmouth, Middlebury, Carleton, Whitman, UC Davis, etc. have all increased in prestige in the past several decades.</p>
<p>I think JHS gets it pretty much right – particularly the point about real estate.</p>
<p>Jerome Karabell’s book (The Chosen: The History of Admissions at H, Y and P, or something like that) is pretty fascinating, certainly exhaustively researched. Though Harvard has pretty much always been the 800 pound gorilla of American education, even its reputation has gone through cycles. </p>
<p>For instance, in the nineteenth century, Yale grew to be a larger institution than Harvard, and arguably, a more progressive one. Its curriculum reforms started earlier than Harvard’s, and many were ultimately copied by Harvard. Yale was the first to grow into a full-fledged university, awarding the first PhD in America, and the first PhD to an African American. The situation reversed starting around the turn of the 20th century under Eliot.</p>
<p>Karabell notes that in the first half of the 20th century, Yale was a more popular college, receiving more applications than Harvard generally. (In popular culture, maybe Yale’s powerhouse football status, and Rudy Vallee and Cole Porter boosterism helped it to dominate, like Harvard’s media position today.) Small but bustling New Haven’s lively theater scene and the attendant bars and speakeasies made it seem a little more attractive than still puritanical “banned in Boston” Boston. Harvard still had the tinge of being a New England brahmin preserve, while Yale was developing a more national pull.</p>
<p>Howard Greene, in his 1976 book “Scaling the Ivy Walls”, one of the first of the now flood of college counseling guides, provides an analysis of the prominence of Ivy grads. He combined lists of people in prestige positions (Fortune 500 ceos, congressmen and senators, Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners, etc. etc.) and looked at which colleges they came from. Relative to the size of the alumni network, Yale led the list, beating Harvard by a small margin, but then there was a big drop with, I think, Columbia coming in third. Princeton came in 6th or 7th. (I can’t find a web link to it, but I think I still have the book buried somewhere in storage). The data was from the early 70s so these were mostly graduates of the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. I bet the list would be a little different today.</p>
<p>The situation changed dramatically after WWII. Boston/Cambridge held their own, while deindustrializing New Haven went on a dramatic 35 year decline. Until Kingman Brewster became Yale’s prez in the late 60s, Yale was seen as a much more conservative and slow moving train than Harvard, often running to play catch-up with Harvard. Additionally, Yale developed financial problems in the 70s. In the late 1960s, the endowments of Yale and Harvard were almost identical (just shy of a billion), even though Harvard had become a much larger institution. Yale basically stayed in the stock market in the weak market years of the 70s, while Harvard did more diversifying. By 1980, Harvard had about $2billion while Yale had about $1.2. That ratio has not really changed much in the last 30 years. </p>
<p>Over most of the post WWII era, Yale lost the admissions edge against Harvard, and particularly the cross-admit battle. (At New Haven’s worst point in the early 90s, Yale for a short time fell to fifth place among the 8 ivies in selectivity as measured by % of students admitted, behind Harvard, Princeton, Brown and Columbia; though in terms of cross admit battles and SAT scores it probably never really lost its #2 spot).</p>
<p>Today Stanford is clearly the American university with momentum and Harvard’s true rival. In the sciences and humanities it is basically Harvard’s close peer, and superior in some disciplines; Its professional schools are Harvard’s close rivals; and its engineering prowess is so far ahead of Harvard’s that Harvard is not really a rival. For the past 5 years it has raised 50 to 75% more money annually from its similarly sized pool of alumni than Harvard has; it will almost certainly surpass Yale as the #2 endowment in the next few years and then tag after Harvard. </p>
<p>As Heraclitus of old said “Ta panta rhei” – “all is flux.”</p>
<p>It’s the age and the name. Not much beyond that. As much as I am going to get railed for this, once you get into the top 30 or so on USNews, you’re going to be challenged and get a great education. Harvard is the big deal, just like Ferrari is the big car. Now, Ferrari’s are not the most expensive and best cars in the world, but they’re household names. Just like Harvard. </p>
<p>The exception is, with no other school will every door open for you when you say you went to Harvard. Saying “I went to MIT” is great, but saying “I went to Harvard” is a huge, ten fold difference.</p>
<p>^ Silly, silly, silly. Maybe “I went to Harvard” is worth 1.005 x “I went to MIT”.* Tenfold? Only among the most clueless of high school students, or people so ignorant their opinion can’t possibly matter.</p>
<ul>
<li>Actually, the excess value would be a little less in math or science, and a little more in the humanities. In engineering it would be worth about .8 x MIT.</li>
</ul>
<p>
</p>
<p>Why don’t you first graduate from both and then you can test your “hypothesis?”</p>
<p>Have you graduated from either?^</p>
<p>No, I haven’t even started college yet. The university at which I will matriculate in the fall is approximately 0.7 X MIT, which would make it 0.07 X Harvard, I guess.</p>
<p>Ummmm… Why are we attacking people for their opinions? Hes not saying Harvard IS tenfold better than MIT (some might even say its worse) he is saying the Harvard BRAND is tenfold MORE WELL KNOWN than MIT…</p>
<p>So, why dont we agree to disagree, and stop using the web shield to say things to a person you wouldnt say face to face.</p>
<p>In my OPINION (just in case someone wanted to yap at me… its MY opinion… not yours)</p>
<p>Harvard got its reputation for being the first college in America (and the first corporation). It also got its reputation for its growing endowment, its history of educating the “sons of the elite” (people like the word elite, as much as its a love/hate relationship), the fact that many wealthy, storied families and people have gone there (the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, … we forgive Yale and Harvard for educating the Bush family), and the fact that it, from the start, was a high class institution… It, unlike, say, the College of William and Mary, chose elite status at the first available chance. W&M chose to become public and offer a high quality of education for a lower cost (which is now does)… Harvard made its choices with the backburner thought of “Will this add prestige?” And guess what, it did.</p>
<p>Now, as Yalie, Im honour bound to hate the place, but I can, and do, respect its prestige and the quality of education offered there (although I will never understand why people would want to go there over… say… YALE)</p>
<p>^ I could always send you a list of the reasons I chose Harvard over Yale :). </p>
<p>Harvard has time in its back pocket. It is 140 years older than the United States, so combined with the way they approached education, their brand was bound to permeate.</p>
<p>Hahaha nah Im good. Im cool with your decision :P</p>
<p>^^ haha I love your school pride but for the life of me I never understood the attraction to Yale:p harvard has, what I like to call, a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy in propagating it’s prestige. By selecting only some of the brightest and most talented students, compounded with a history and endowment to make heads spin, it continues to maintain it’s cushy #1 spot. Also, Harvard is well known worldwide as one of the top universities because of this. For example, my Nigerian grandfather ( before he passed away) always fantasized about one of his children going to Harvard or Cambridge. When your college is well known across the world, it opens more opportunities, more occasions to shine, which reflects right back on the university:) just my 2 cents;)</p>