<p>Byerly: That works assuming an <em>objective</em> correct answer.</p>
<p>If Harvard is better for 70% of applicants and Stanford is better for 30%, it's still folly to tell a random applicant that Harvard is for them without taking into account the subjective details.</p>
<p>"This site hosts one file, the subjective ranking of American undergraduate colleges done by newengland, an anonymous internet personality." -- collegeadmssions.tripod.com</p>
<p>What Byerly did not tell you is that the Laissez-Faire "rankings" to which he refers is a SUBJECTIVE ranking done by AN ANONYMOUS INTERNET PERSONALITY named NEWENGLAND. So much for its objectivity and validity. But let's assume that NEWENGLAND's ranking of Harvard as number one and Stanford, Yale, and Princeton as tied for number two, as well as all the other rankings cited by Byerly which designate Harvard as number one, were valid in the eyes of the college ranking gods. Does anyone (other than Byerly) really believe that there is a "clinically significant" superiority of one school's peer group over the others' among these top four schools?</p>
<p>There is no question that Harvard, by virtue of its history and other factors, has a unique brand name, and that this is a signficant factor in its cross-admit advantage over the other schools. But market superiority due to brand name advantage does not necessarily translate into product superiority, particularly with regard to variables that many consumers might consider important. Take satisfaction with the quality of the undergraduate experience, for example:</p>
<p>According to this 2005 Boston Globe article: </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>
<p>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>PLEASE NOTE: These data about undergraduate students' dissatisfaction at Harvard were described in an internal Harvard memo, not by some Yalie conspirator. Harvard has taken this issue very seriously and is trying to figure out how to make Harvard a happier place for its undergraduates. At Stanford, however, it is difficult to find an undergraduate who is not ga-ga about his or her experience, in terms of both quality of instruction and quality of life.</p>
<p>Byerly places a lot of emphasis on the decisions of 17 and 18 year old prospective students, many of whom, like Byerly, are heavily swayed by Harvard's brand name status. Perhaps one should also listen to the voices of the existing undergraduates, and the school administrators who are trying to respond to them. The academic opportunities at Stanford and Harvard are essentially comparable. If one is drawn to the stimulating environment of Cambridge-Boston and all the other wonderful things that Harvard has to offer, then Harvard of course would be a great choice. If one prefers the west coast influenced quality of life along with the strong faculty access, quality of instruction, undergraduate research opportunities, study abroad opportunities, competitive athletics, and relatively nurturing sense of community that Stanford has to offer, then... go Cardinal.</p>
<p>One of my friends from high school went to Stanford over Harvard because of the "sunny weather" and the "laid-back attitude". When I went to visit him, he seemed a little regretful. The "sunny weather" is overrated and Stanford people can be just as intense. After that visit, my decision was easy - the opposite of what he made. He majored in electrical engineering and works for some small start-up software company now - not making big bucks anytime too soon, though. If he had gone to Harvard, he probably would have been a doctor or a lawyer.</p>
<p>By the way, there are some very obvious problems with the survey you mention.
1. No one else has seen the survey results so you can't draw you own conclusions.
2. There is no response rate. I wouldn't make much of surveys with a response rate below 50%.
3. They rated only their own school on an absolute scale, not relative to other schools. MIT may have gotten a higher score than Harvard, but this doesn't necessarily imply that Harvard students would have rated MIT higher on a side-by-side comparison. Your reasoning that Harvard "ranks near the bottom of a group of 31 elite private colleges" is flawed.
4. Intuititvely, there's no reason why Harvard students would be more "disenchanted" than anybody else. They are at the best school on the face of the earth and have everything going for them!<br>
5. On the second page of the article, there's a small graphic from the survey showing that 25% of Harvard students are very satisfied, 54% are satisfied, 14% are ambivalent, and 7% are dissatisfied. This is actually consistent with my own experience. There's always going to be some losers who blame their own problems on the school. These numbers seem to be somewhat worse than other schools (which have a 5% dissatisfaction rate) but I'm not sure if this is a statistically significant difference. Again, this top secret survey is not available for analysis by anyone else.</p>
<p>Yes, I do also believe that there is a "clinically significant" superiority of one school's peer group over the others' among these top four schools. For example, I was a member of the New York City Math Team, which often wins the national championship. Of the 15 people on the team my year, 10 went to Harvard, one went to Caltech, one to MIT, one to Stanford, one to Cornell, and one to Princeton. It's because Harvard takes the creme de la creme of the best math students in the country that it has managed to win the Putnam 25 times while none of the other three has (51 top finishes compared to 5 by Stanford). This is the situation in pretty much everything. Harvard takes the very best in each category (but not all so that other schools can have some, too). It won't be obvious if you compared an "average" Harvard student to an "average" Yale student, but if you looked at the overall strength of the student body, the difference is unmistakable. The same thing with the faculty. Every school website will be talking about their "world-renowned faculty who are leaders in their field" and sure, it won't be obvious if you compared an "average" professor from one school to an "average" professor from another. But collectively, the difference is substantial. Harvard and Yale have about the same number of faculty members in Arts and Sciences, but look at the numbers in the National Academy of Sciences. This is the reason why it's useful to at least be aware of the kinds of statistics I posted. You then draw your own conclusion.</p>
<p>In regard to ske293's friend, he could just as easily become a doctor or a lawyer at Stanford as an electrical engineer. Without debating the merits of Harvard versus Stanford, the friend's choice Stanford over Harvard did not limit his career options , as ske293 seems to imply.</p>
<p>My friend chose Stanford over Harvard. She said that she liked the atmosphere of Stanford and that Harvard was somewhat "pretentious." My other friend (who attends a different school) chose Harvard over Stanford. She said that Stanford was too "laid-back" for her. It is all a matter of personal preference. :D</p>
<p>please Byerly, if you really want to compare them that way then let's take a real world analogy shall we?
for example, the current mp3 player market. im sure a person with your "vast amount" of knowledge would know that just about everyone and their mother has an ipod. but does that make it the superior mp3 machine? does that mean it stores more, weighs less, has longer battery life, or comes with better headphones than other mp3 players on the market?
most people who purchase ipods will justify their expenditure with the simple reasoning "everybody has one"
think about that</p>
<p>post by ske93,</p>
<p>"He majored in electrical engineering and works for some small start-up software company now - not making big bucks anytime too soon, though. If he had gone to Harvard, he probably would have been a doctor or a lawyer."</p>
<p>Are you clueless? His going to Stanford meant that he "had" to be an engineer? Dude, your friend picked engineering as a career choice. Don't be ignorant and say that it was his school that caused him not to be a doctor or lawyer.</p>
<p>No offense, but that was a really silly statement.</p>
<p>That's exactly what I was trying to say! You just said it a little more directly!</p>
<p>ske293,</p>
<ol>
<li>I know a Harvard alum who's over 40 and he's making just $70,000, less than many mid-level EE engineers make.<br></li>
<li>A CEO of a successful software company can make a lot more than typical doctors/lawyers do.<br></li>
<li>Majoring EE doesn't stop anyone from being premed/prelaw and going to med/law school.</li>
</ol>
<p>Time to retract your silly statement!!!</p>
<p>
[quote]
This is the situation in pretty much everything.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>What situation? Sports? Engineers? Silicon Valley?</p>
<p>Geez, another silly statement of the day!</p>
<p>
[quote]
3. Majoring EE doesn't stop anyone from being premed/prelaw and going to med/law school.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>At some schools, it stops many, because of harsh curves killing the GPA or failing out. At Stanford, I'm sure it's not an issue, just like at Harvard.</p>
<p>Oh come on now, ske293. If your concern is that Stanford graduates will "not [be] making big bucks anytime too soon" or that they should have gone to Harvard in order to have become doctors or lawyers, here is a list of some successful business leaders and "attorneys" who have done well for themselves after graduating from Stanford. You tell me if their bucks are big enough. You could also add to the list Steve Westly, an eBay multi-millionaire and possible future California governor. If I had put more effort into this, I'm sure that I could have come up with a doctor or two who attended Stanford as an undergraduate.</p>
<p>Business Leaders: Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft; Eric Benhamou, Chairman, 3Com; Doris Fisher, co-founder, Gap, Inc.; Joseph Gallo, CEO, E&J Gallo Winery; William Hewlett and David Packard (both deceased), founders, Hewlett-Packard Co.; Philip Knight, Chairman and CEO, Nike, Inc.; Bill and Mel Lane, formerly of Sunset Publishing Corp.; Peter Magowan, President, San Francisco Giants; Scott McNealy, Chairman and CEO, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Robert Mondavi, founder, Mondavi Wines; Charles Schwab, Chairman, Charles Schwab Corp.; Greg Steltenpohl, co-founder, Odwalla; Chih-Yuan "Jerry" Yang and David Filo, founders, Yahoo!; and Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, founders of Google.</p>
<p>Supreme Court Justices: Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day OConnor.</p>
<p>Regarding the survey, it is not my reasoning that Harvard "ranks near the bottom of a group of 31 elite private colleges" with regard to undergraduate satisfaction; that is simply the empirical finding that is cited in the article. Now you may quibble with the methodology of the survey, but the fact is, the results were of sufficient concern at Harvard to prompt the drafting of a confidential 21 page internal memo to the academic deans, who have taken the findings seriously enough to to try to remedy the problems. These results are taken seriously because they mirror long held concerns. Obviously, most Harvard students are satisfied overall with their college experience, but enough are not to make these issues worthy of consideration in selecting a school, particularly if the alternatives are elite schools without these problems.</p>
<p>With all due respect, the fact that the New York City Math Team overwhelmingly prefers Harvard to Stanford means nothing about the general comparability of academic and intellectual firepower that exists among the elite schools. I don't think that the 8 Intel finalists who have selected Stanford are going to have any more trouble finding a peer group than the 11 who are going to Harvard.</p>
<p>Steve Ballmer went to Harvard undergrad, not Stanford. I'm not sure if the other business leaders you mention all went to Stanford undergrad but I don't recognize most of their names. If you are talking about grad schools, both Stephen Breyer and Anthony Kennedy went to Harvard Law School. Sandra O'Connor is retired. If you want to look at all the retired and dead people, you can imagine that Harvard would outnumber everybody by an enormous margin simply because it's been around longer. Harvard currently leads both in the number of bachelor's degree recipients who are Fortune 500 CEOs and in the number of MBA recipients who are Fortune 500 CEOs. 23% of Fortune 500 CEO with MBAs got their degree from Harvard. Now, that's an impressive figure.</p>
<p>I'm not gloating over these statistics that favor Harvard, but am just trying to refute your suggestion that all these schools are pretty much interchangeable. Since it's difficult to compare the quality of schools, I am focusing on hard data in areas that are amenable to objective comparisons and are meaningful (unlike arbitrary rankings or admissions statistics, which can be easily manipulated). The data does confirm that Stanford has a far more comprehensive and better engineering program than any of the Ivies. It also confirms that Harvard enrolls the most talented undergraduate student body among the four schools and it is the most successful in having students win prestigious honors and go to top graduate schools. I say that's a very important consideration.</p>
<p>I did not mean to imply that going to Stanford prevents one from becoming a doctor or lawyer. Statistically, however, you are more likely to end up being a doctor or a lawyer if you are at Harvard than if you are at Stanford. Stanford does indeed do extremely well in grad school placement and is almost always somewhere betwen #2 to #4 at the top schools. The #1 slot is, however, almost always taken by Harvard. Yale Law School and Medical School both enroll more Harvard graduates than Yale graduates. The same thing is true at Columbia Law and Medical Schools, and other top Ivy graduate schools. Harvard Law, Business, and Medical Schools, of course, enroll many more Harvard graduates than those of any other school. This is an implicit acknowlegement by the admissions officers at the top graduate schools that they consider the caliber of Harvard undergraduates to be unmatched. The Wall Street Journal study, which I included in the table, showed that in 2003, 358 Harvard grads enrolled in the incoming class at the top graduate schools, while Stanford had 181. </p>
<p>I think Stanford is an awesome school and is probably the school that comes closest to Harvard in being well-rounded. Yale undergrads might be slightly stronger than Stanford's but their science programs are just not at the same level as Stanford's. Although rarely mentioned, Stanford also benefits from being very far away from the suffocating domination by Harvard, which Yale has had to put up with for centuries. Another one of my friends, also a fellow New Yorker who went to Harvard, didn't get into Harvard Med. He went to Stanford Med instead, although he could've gone to Hopkins, Penn, or Yale Med, which I believe are generally ranked more highly than Stanford. He told everyone that he was going to Stanford for a change of scenery, but I knew the real reason was he didn't get into Harvard. If he had gone to Hopkins, everyone would've correctly figured out that he didn't get into his first choice school.</p>
<p>Stanford is a fine choice, especially if you are interested in engineering. Engineering majors in my experience are the ones who bring down the curve in math and physics classes, the same way dental students help make the curve more palatable in medical school classes. They are also more often told what to do, rather than telling others what to do. But they make cool stuff and some are incredibly clever, so I respect engineers a lot. Harvard students in general have a great deal of respect for that other school in Cambridge down the street, whch almost got swallowed up by Harvard twice in the past. The bridge that connects MIT to Boston is called the Harvard Bridge, so MIT is in any case enveloped by Harvard on both sides. But there is mutual respect. </p>
<p>I disagree with FarmDad on that the only difference between Harvard and Stanford is the number of New York City Math Team members. Harvard also gets by far the most International Math Olympiad and Physics/Chemistry Olympiad and Intel Competition winners than anybody else. I guess this year Stanford did unusually well in getting the Intel winners. But Harvard almost always leads in every category. You may or may not find that important in deciding where to go to college and may decide the weather factor to be the most important one. It's all fine with me - as long as you acknowledge who's the boss.</p>
<p>
[quote]
FarmDad wrote at <a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showpost.php?p=2362606&postcount=174:%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showpost.php?p=2362606&postcount=174:</a></p>
<p>Business Leaders: Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft; Eric Benhamou, Chairman, 3Com; Doris Fisher, co-founder, Gap, Inc.; Joseph Gallo, CEO, E&J Gallo Winery; William Hewlett and David Packard (both deceased), founders, Hewlett-Packard Co.; Philip Knight, Chairman and CEO, Nike, Inc.; Bill and Mel Lane, formerly of Sunset Publishing Corp.; Peter Magowan, President, San Francisco Giants; Scott McNealy, Chairman and CEO, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Robert Mondavi, founder, Mondavi Wines; Charles Schwab, Chairman, Charles Schwab Corp.; Greg Steltenpohl, co-founder, Odwalla; Chih-Yuan "Jerry" Yang and David Filo, founders, Yahoo!; and Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, founders of Google.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The list provided by FarmDad contains a mixture of undergraduate and graduate students. Here's a list of where some of those people got their undergraduate degrees:</p>
<p>Steve Ballmer: B.A. Economics in 1977 from Harvard University, where he befriended and sponsored Bill Gates into his fraternity. Ballmer also apparently did pretty well in the Putnam math competition. Ballmer never received a degree from Stanford because he dropped out of the MBA program about a year after matriculation.</p>
<p>Eric Benhamou: Dipl</p>
<p>
[quote]
23% of Fortune 500 CEO with MBAs got their degree from Harvard. Now, that's an impressive figure.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Why don't you keep things simple? Only 3% of the S&P 500 CEOs received their undergrad degress from Harvard. NINETY SEVEN PERCENT DIDN'T! You can ignore this fact and keep masturbating yourself with the idea of how your Harvard diploma would get you anything you want. LOL!</p>
<p>
[quote]
I did not mean to imply that going to Stanford prevents one from becoming a doctor or lawyer. Statistically, however, you are more likely to end up being a doctor or a lawyer if you are at Harvard than if you are at Stanford
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Dude, Stanford has bunch of engineers that are less inclinded to be doctors or lawyers. IT'S ALL ABOUT PERSONAL CHOICE!! Hope that's not too difficult for you to grasp.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Engineering majors in my experience are the ones who bring down the curve in math and physics classes, the same way dental students help make the curve more palatable in medical school classes. They are also more often told what to do, rather than telling others what to do.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>With respect to whom? Not bio/chemistry/geology majors from my experience. So math majors perform the best in math classes and physics majors score the best in physics class and that means engineers are dumber? LOL! You mentioned how engineers "make cool stuff"; I'd think math major don't "make cool stuff" as good as the engineers. Hey, I know a guy with a physics degree from Harvard and he sucks in programming. By the way, if you really like to "tell others what to do", major in business! At work, math/physicists are often told what their tasks are by their managers! Oh, if you look at what the undergrad majors of those S&P 500 CEOs are, you'd find that many more of them hold ENGINEERING DEGREES than math/physics degrees! Now, who's telling who what to do? LOL! I think we are all waiting for more silly statements from you. Thanks for giving us things to laugh at. ;)</p>
<p>"Stanford does indeed do extremely well in grad school placement and is almost always somewhere betwen #2 to #4 at the top schools. The #1 slot is, however, almost always taken by Harvard. Yale Law School and Medical School both enroll more Harvard graduates than Yale graduates. The same thing is true at Columbia Law and Medical Schools, and other top Ivy graduate schools. Harvard Law, Business, and Medical Schools, of course, enroll many more Harvard graduates than those of any other school. This is an implicit acknowlegement by the admissions officers at the top graduate schools that they consider the caliber of Harvard undergraduates to be unmatched. "</p>
<p>Setting aside whatever differences there are between admission and enrollment (admission being the more accurate measure of an undergraduate school's "success"), and the size of the undergraduate population (clearly % of undergraduate population would be a more accurate measurement tool than # from a particular school)....Are you really arguing there's a substantial difference between being #1 on the grad school admit list and #4? The reasons to choose Stanford over Harvard (or visa versa) have nothing to do with which school has more students going to Harvard Bus/Law/Med. It has to do with where a student thinks the undergraduate experience will be more suitable for him/her.</p>
<p>I find it funny that ske293 quibbles with the methodology of the Boston Globe survey but not WSJ's. You don't need to be a student at top schools to know the WSJ is wonderfully flawed. Just look at what they consider the 15 top programs: </p>
<p>
[quote]
So for medicine, our schools were Columbia; Harvard; Johns Hopkins; the University of California, San Francisco; and Yale, while our MBA programs were Chicago; Dartmouth's Tuck School; Harvard; MIT's Sloan School; and Penn's Wharton School. In law, we looked at Chicago; Columbia; Harvard; Michigan; and Yale.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>MBA: Dartmouth instead of Stanford!
Medicine: Columbia/Yale instead of WashU!
Law: Columbia instead of Stanford!</p>
<p>Only ONE out of the 15 programs are on the west coast! Geez, I guess Stanford is doing pretty good in spite of how unbalanced the list is. Many people in California don't move elsewhere because they can't imagine putting themselves into those freezing winters. That's why so many of us keep putting up with living in a tiny 2-bedroom condos instead of mansions elsewhere. Anyway, it's likely Harvard still has the most even if we have a more balanced list (geographically), but the difference would be much less than ske293's numbers suggest.</p>
<p>Sam Lee, you bring up what I've been ranting about for a long time now.</p>
<p>Frankly, Stanford should be included both with SLS and GSB.</p>
<p>No one really addressed greek life. It's 10% of the population at stanford, but I think it comprises most of the party scene at stanford. Mostly the frats throw parties, but anyone goes.</p>
<p>No one really cares if you're in a frat/sorority, but it's a good thing for making a ton of friends really quick. Less recommended for girls; you should really like most of the girls in the sorority.</p>