<p>First off, the similarities between Harvard and Yale far, far outweigh any differences in tone. They basically accept the same types of kids, who do the same types of things while they are there.</p>
<p>That said, in my generation (and I never attended Harvard, but had lots of friends and relatives there, and spent plenty of time there) I definitely thought Yale was a more collegial, friendly place. There were two main reasons for that: </p>
<p>First, the residential college system at Yale seemed to work better for fostering close relationships among students who had little in common. Kids were assigned randomly to a college before they matriculated, and they basically lived with the same people for all four years. At Harvard, you used to have to apply competitively to a house at the end of freshman year, and now its more random, but there is still a major reshuffling that goes on. The Yale system doesn't change who your closest friends are, but it means that after a few years you tend to have a very wide secondary circle of friends who you know pretty well and feel comfortable with, and they have close friends whom you meet, etc. I would never have gotten to know my wife but for the Yale residential colleges -- we didn't travel in the same circles at all, but we ate in the same dining hall and one of her friends started going out with one of my friends, and so we wound up at the same lunch table a few times. I'm sure that happens at Harvard, too, but at Harvard my wife and this particular friend of hers, and I and this particular friend of mine (later a roommate), would likely have wound up in four different houses.</p>
<p>Second, then and now people who cared a lot about brand value tended to choose Harvard over Yale, so Harvard had more of them. (At Yale, lots of kids will tell you they picked it because of the residential college system, which shows what they value, too.) To me, this gave Harvard an atmosphere something like New York -- "if I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere" -- people were very conscious of being at the center of the world and needing both to take advantage of it and to prove themselves. The question lots of people seemed to be asking was "How can I carve out a niche for myself?" This led to lots of overt competitiveness, not so much in the classroom (not at all, certainly no more than at Yale) as on the Crimson or the Lampoon, etc. That was hardly unknown at Yale, but Harvard seemed to attract a somewhat greater proportion of kids whose ambitions were somewhat more naked, and who liked engaging in dominance games with each other. In the zeitgeist of Yale at the time, overt personal ambition was a social faux pas (it was OK to want to change the world).</p>
<p>There are tons of counterexamples at each school to every statement I've made: warm, secure, noncompetitive people at Harvard with broad friendship circles, Napoleonic misanthropes at Yale. Still, the structural features have not changed much, and most of what I see and hear from my kids' friends suggests that the differences between the schools are still much the same. Many of the Harvard kids are quite anxious about whether they fit in, and what niche they are going to own. The Yale kids just don't worry about it much.</p>