<p>"It’s well known that there are many other colleges where students are much more satisfied with their academic experience [than they are at Harvard]"</p>
<p>"The nation’s leading research universities have been looking for ways to better balance research and teaching for the past decade. Some institutions, like Yale and Princeton, are known for their commitment to both."</p>
<p>Yes, I think I want to go to Harvard for the same reasons.</p>
<p>Why? There are places where you can find smart people AND actually get to interact with them.</p>
<p>From the article: As Professor Skocpol put it, “People at Harvard are concerned when they hear that some of our undergraduates can go through four years here and not know a faculty member well enough to get a letter of recommendation.”</p>
<p>I find that terribly amusing for some reason. Even the complaints about teaching are about letters of recommendation for grad school.</p>
<p>They go to Harvard to get As: <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=518824%5B/url%5D">http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=518824</a></p>
<p>Hey, who needs personal interaction when you've got that glowing Harvard grade report? </p>
<p>Ok, I kid. Still, it is kind of amusing to see this issue discussed over and over while the faculty form committees to talk about it. For what it's worth, a committee is an excellent stalling technique because it looks like you're doing something when in reality nothing is actually implemented.</p>
<p>Bok and Faust want professors to teach more?</p>
<p>Isn't that what really cost Summers his job?</p>
<p>from winkopedia</p>
<p>"While many in the media have focused upon the controversial statements made by Summers or his political disagreement with left-leaning members of the faculty, it is also possible that these factors merely provided a pretext for members of the faculty to express their dissatisfaction with other aspects of Summers' presidency. Besides the aforementioned controversies, ... other factors have been proposed as contributing to his critical loss of support among the majority of faculty members. ... a supposed substantive disagreement about the structure and philosophy of the undergraduate curriculum, amidst an intensive curricular review initiated during Summers' term. Summers proposed that more emphasis be put on undergraduate education and requested that professors actually teach their undergraduate classes, as opposed to conferring responsibility on teaching assistants. ..."</p>
<p>I know several people at Harvard right now, and you would not believe the stories I hear. In one case, a professor just stopped showing up and the TA had to teach the remainder of the course all on their own. Good for the TA's experience, of course, but come on.</p>
<p>Duh? I'm surprised this is news to people. I don't think Harvard or its fans have ever claimed that Harvard offers an intimate, fulfilling undergraduate education. It has never promised the best teacher-student relationships. I'm pretty sure that people choose Harvard despite this deficiency, not out of any illusion that Harvard provides intimate academics.
My Harvard interviewer laughed at me when I asked about getting attention from professors at college. To him that was unheard of. But that's just not Harvard's strength.</p>
<p>
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I know several people at Harvard right now,
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perhaps you could have them comment directly instead of hearsay?? My daughter has had wonderful contact with many of the faculty, including the famous. She hasn't had a class yet that wasn't taught by a full PHD. TA's hold section, they don't lecture. Let's hear some first hand stories instead of third hand "I know somebody that knew somebody that said they heard....."</p>
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<p>You're right that I don't find you believable. You have a track record of not backing up your trolling statements on this forum. Because you are back, I will renew my request for honest, verifiable information to back up one of your incredible statements. </p>
<p>My S has had a varied experience. Some terrific profs and some not so terrific profs (though they are stars in their fields). All, however, cared. One of the not-quite-so terrific profs scheduled one-on-one meetings with every single student in the 40+ class. He also had some terrific TFs and some not so terrific TFs.
I don't think his experience was very different from that of his brother who attended a LAC, except that his brother did not have TFs, so that the attempts by profs to hold discussion sections did not work very well (classes of 40+) and that he was shut out of some courses that he needed for his gen ed requirements and his major. As far as the ratio of terrific to not-so-terrific profs, however, there really was no difference.</p>
<p>As far as the comparison with Amherst is concerned, it is good to remember that the focus of most complaints is the required courses, either in the core or in the concentration (major). Amherst has an open curriculum, like Brown. When my S visited Brown, the students exuded enthusiasm for the classes they took "where everybody is there because they want to be there." Thus, student complaints do not necessarily have to do with the quality of teaching as such, or even faculty accessibility. If students take courses because they feel they have too, they will not seek out a prof, no matter how open his office door is.</p>
<p>When I was an undergraduate at Harvard (quite recently), I noticed that students often tended to give higher marks on the CUE guide for the "quality of teaching" to professors who dumbed down the difficulty of the subject and explained everything in detail (and skip the hard stuff). Students also gave higher marks to professors who had a good sense of humor (and thus more likeable) and those who were enthusiastic (or at least pretended to be enthusiastic) about teaching and students.</p>
<p>Quite honestly, some of this really had nothing to do with the actual quality of teaching. Physics professors who insisted on rigorous thinking often got much worse ratings than those who just made it less painful, for example. Personally, I am more inspired by great minds and brilliant thinkers than people who just go by the textbook and repeat it several times in several different ways so that it can be drilled into even the dullest brain in the room. The latter is not what I consider great teaching but I'm sure other people think differently. </p>
<p>Places like Amherst and Williams hire and promote professors based on their dedication to teaching. So naturally, the professors take great pains to come up with ways to make ideas more accessible and interesting. Harvard and other reserach universities hire and promote professors almost entirely based on their research accomplishments. It is then no surprise that Harvard professors don't spend the bulk of their energy improving their powerpoint presentations. Which I think is actually fine.</p>
<p>What I find outrageous is when people from other similarly research-oriented universities claim that they are somehow better at teaching than Harvard. Given that their professors don't have any special incentives to spend more time teaching than Harvard professors, this claim is simply ludicrous. Just think about it. It's the only way these schools, e.g. Yale and Princeton, can claim to better than Harvard because if you just look at objective measures, Harvard outclasses them pretty much every time. What is the evidence that Yale and Princeton teach their graduates better? Has someone done a learning assessment study before and after entering college at these three schools? Of course not. Are Yale and Princeton graduates more successful? (Hell no, it's the opposite, by almost every measure) Harvard produces more scholarship winners, sends more students to top graduate schools, and produces more leaders in every imaginable field than these two schools. </p>
<p>And actually, Harvard professors on the average tend to be pretty decent teachers.</p>
<p>That just changes all of my aspirations. I was contemplating Harvard cuz I heard it was a place that combines all. Now, I'm leaning much more towards other Ivies. Even Cornell would be better for me now than Harvard. I think that it would be better if one could find universities that combine all, and there are such unis.</p>
<p>"It's the only way these schools, e.g. Yale and Princeton, can claim to better than Harvard because if you just look at objective measures, Harvard outclasses them pretty much every time."</p>
<p>That's simply not true, as many of my previous posts attest. Harvard does out class Swarthmore, Caltech, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, etc., in one area: it's size. And particularly the size of its professional programs like the business school. Because of its size, many supposedly "objective" rankings are inherently biased in its favor. You really can't equate size with excellence, however, whether you are studying academic excellence or undergraduate program quality.</p>
<p>PosterX...quit spewing your ridiculous exaggerations.</p>
<p>Why is he wrong?
You cannot say that Harvard is better academically than other colleges. After all, at many peer-evaluated sites, other colleges get better rankings in academics than Harvard. And a ubiquitous opinion that I have been encountering (which I am not going to either refute or endorse) is that Harvard has been declining..</p>
<p>Harvard IS the place that combines all. It's the only school that combines the most talented undergraduate student body in the country with a faculty unmatched in every discipline of the arts and sciences - humanities, biological and physical sciences, and social sciences. Not to mention the professional schools that are easily the most powerful and influential in their respective fields. Not to mention the resources other schools can only salivate about. And a brand name that schools like Yale or Princeton will never be able to touch. How many magazine covers and New York Times articles are there about Yale? Undoubtedly a tiny fraction of Harvard's.</p>
<p>Stanford and Berkeley are about the only schools that can come close to matching the overall academic strengths of Harvard. But Berkeley doesn't have a medical school and its undergraduate student body does not quite compare to Ivy League standards. Stanford is better in that regard, but at the undergraduate level, it still primarily serves the population of California. In a head-to-head battle, Stanford even loses to Yale.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that if you consider the "quality of teaching" at top research universities, there is very little difference. And among the top research universities, Harvard comes out well ahead of the pack in overall academic excellence and prestige. </p>
<p>Liberal arts colleges are probably more dedicated to teaching. A larger percentage of graduates from small liberal arts colleges do go into Ph.D. programs than at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, but on the other hand go into professional degree programs at much lower percentages. It's not possible to conclude that liberal arts college graduates are "better educated" or "more successful".</p>
<p>"You cannot say that Harvard is better academically than other colleges."</p>
<p>Sure you can. Harvard has 3 times as many professors in the National Academy of Sciences than Yale and more than twice as many professors in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences than Yale. 34 Harvard professors have won the Nobel Prize while they were at Harvard, while only 5 Yale professors have done so. Harvard dwarfs Yale in research funding and publication in pretty much every area. The leaders in the field are several times more likely to be at Harvard than at Yale. Now, for example, if you don't know anything and are taking intro economics 101, you may not appreciate much of a difference, but someone more advanced and sophisticated than you will surely realize that Harvard economics department does not compare to Yale's. Same for Harvard math department, government, biology, chemistry, physics.... the list goes on.</p>
<p>"After all, at many peer-evaluated sites, other colleges get better rankings in academics than Harvard." </p>
<p>These rankings are based on surveys, which is baloney. If you look at objective rankings, for example, the J-T university ranking that is based on publications, prizes, citations, etc. Harvard pretty much outclasses every other school in the world - in Humanities, Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, Medicine, and Social Sciences. The J-T university rankings, the London Times rankings, and the Newsweek rankings all agree that Harvard is the number one school in the world, which is really stating what is painfully obvious.</p>
<p>Oh, people have been saying that Harvard is declining for decades, if not centuries.</p>
<p>Having attended both an elite LAC and Harvard for the two halves of my undergraduate career, it's been my experience that at both types of schools, most profs are good to excellent, and a few are terrible. Frankly, there are a lot of very good professors at most community colleges.</p>
<p>There's no question that a large research university requires its undergraduates to be more pro-active about seeking out the contact they want than they would have to be at an LAC. The trade-off is that there are far more options and types of experiences available to the pro-active student at the research university. If you are going to hide in the corner and wait for the professor to pull you out of your shell, Harvard is not the right school for you, and its peers aren't either.</p>
<p>debate addict -- I'm curious why you seem more inclined to accept the opinions of posters with no ties to Harvard who cite "winkopedia" and unattributed hearsay over the opinions of parents of current Harvard students and current and former Harvard students themselves.</p>