<p>It is a shame you felt the need to post this same post on the Princeton board...
Most people would admit that Harvard has better name-brand recognition.
However, many people expect more out of their undergraduate experience than just prestige...</p>
<p>While old-ish news, it serves the point:</p>
<p>Student life at Harvard lags peer schools, poll finds
By Marcella Bombardieri, Globe Staff | March 29, 2005</p>
<p>Student satisfaction at Harvard College ranks near the bottom of a group of 31 elite private colleges, according to an analysis of survey results that finds that Harvard students are disenchanted with the faculty and social life on campus.</p>
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An internal Harvard memo, obtained by the Globe, provides numerical data that appear to substantiate some long-held stereotypes of Harvard: that undergraduate students often feel neglected by professors, and that they don't have as much fun as peers on many other campuses.</p>
<p>The group of 31 colleges, known as the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, or COFHE, includes all eight Ivy League schools, other top research universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, and small colleges like Amherst and Wellesley.</p>
<p>''Harvard students are less satisfied with their undergraduate educations than the students at almost all of the other COFHE schools," according to the memo, dated Oct. 2004 and marked ''confidential." ''Harvard student satisfaction compares even less favorably to satisfaction at our closest peer institutions."</p>
<p>The 21-page memo, from staff researchers at Harvard to academic deans, documents student dissatisfaction with faculty availability, quality of instruction, quality of advising, and student life factors such as sense of community and social life on campus.</p>
<p>The raw data used in the memo come from surveys of graduating seniors in 2002, but are the most recent comparison available and are still consulted by Harvard administrators. On a five-point scale, Harvard students' overall satisfaction comes out to 3.95, compared to an average of 4.16 for the other 30 COFHE schools. Although the difference appears small, Harvard officials say they take the ''satisfaction gap" very seriously.</p>
<p>Only four schools scored lower than Harvard, but the schools were not named. (COFHE data are supposed to be confidential.) The memo also notes that Harvard's ''satisfaction gap" has existed since at least 1994.</p>
<p>''I think we have to concede that we are letting our students down," said Lawrence Buell, an English professor and former dean of undergraduate education. ''Our standard is that Harvard shoots to be the very best. If it shoots to be the very best in terms of research productivity and the stature of its faculty, why should it not shoot to be the very best in terms of the quality of the education that it delivers?"</p>
<p>I think Janet Rapelye, Princeton's Dean of Admissions, should get full credit for candor, and for acknowleging the risk Princeton is taking (which Yale is afraid to take) by casting aside the early admission crutch next year and going head to head with Harvard and others in the regular admissions pool.</p>
<p>From an interview with her today in the Princeton Alumni Weekly:</p>
<p>Q: "The New York Times recently published a chart projecting how selective schools would fare in competing for students with multiple acceptances. Does Princeton have its own projections like this?"</p>
<p>A: "Our numbers are slightly different when I look at the students we lose, and who we lose them to. Our biggest losses every year are to Yale, Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. A large portion of the Stanford losses are engineers And our biggest losses are to Harvard, and that will continue. I know that makes our graduates very uncomfortable, but that has been true forever. Again, there is no one stronger than Princeton to stand up to Harvard, and I am willing to have those admitted [student] overlaps and to try very hard to convince them to come to Princeton. And this is where we need alumni to help us to help us convince these students that Princeton is the very best place to be an undergraduate in this country."</p>