<p>Cool... in any case, that is all completely beside the point.
I'm not trying to argue Harvard is better... it's not.
I consider Harvard=Stanford=Yale=Princeton=MIT.</p>
<p>My only point was that because Harvard has such an incredibly large endowment, it has the ability to invest massive resources into any perceived weakness and turn it around on a timescale that almost no other university can match. So yes, Harvard engineering is relatively weaker than Stanford, MIT... mostly for historical reasons (see the thread on the failed merger of Harvard & MIT back in 1905)... but it has the ability to catch up in the long run. I was just countering this nonsense that Harvard is going to allow itself to slip into obscurity... believe me... Harvard KNOWS what its weaknesses are and who its competitors are, and it will re-position itself as necessary to stay a leader.</p>
<p>Endowments do not include the value of buildings, land associated with the campus, museum holdings etc. The only land values that might be included within a school's endowment are those associated with property held for investment: timberland, shopping centers, downtown office towers, etc.</p>
<p>The original Stanford grant included land never contemplated as a site for campus buildings, but just to provide an income stream. In the early years, much of the operating income stream came from the sale of wine or brandy produced at wineries established by Leland Stanford!</p>
<p>Princeton has long had the greatest endowment per student. I don't think you can really make an argument about Harvard having significantly better monetary resources than Princeton to support its undergraduate students.</p>
<p>We weren't talking about undergrad education, per se...
bu the ability of Harvard to re-position itself given the immense resources available to it.</p>
<p>okay, so throw out the undergrad part of the statement. still, princeton is equal to harvard, financially. and princeton has already "re-positioned" its resources so that it lacks any truly weak departments.</p>
<p>The differences in "endowment per FTE student" (roughly $1,400,000 at Princeton and $1,200,000 at Harvard have little practical significance relative to the overall $23 billion vs $10 billion totals. Look at it this way: A family with $20 million and 5 kids is still richer than a family with 4 million and one kid, in terms of lifestyle, etc. </p>
<p>(1) The "FTE" number at Harvard, for instance, includes students in the Extension School who - far from being a drain on the endowment - are a nice little profit center! </p>
<p>(2) Furthermore, certain professional schools - such as medical schools - are huge sources of income via government money and research grants, etc., so that any "endowment" allocated to them (at Harvard, Stanford, or even the smaller Yale) is an infinetessimal portion of their economic worth.</p>
<p>Calling Stanford regional school is just downright nonsense. It's safe to say that Stanford is not only the school that has shined brightest in the last 3 decades, it is also going to remain a leading institution in the next century:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>In law, 6 of the current nine supreme court justices studied or taught at Stanford. (c.f. <a href="http://www.oyez.org/oyez/portlet/justices/%5B/url%5D">http://www.oyez.org/oyez/portlet/justices/</a>)</p></li>
<li><p>In Science, Stanford won 5 Nobel prizes in physics in the 1990s alone. Stanford's business school alone has 3 living Nobels in Economics (Scholes, Sharpe, Spence); that's not incluing other econ Nobels on campus such as Fuchs, Arrow, etc.</p></li>
<li><p>In business, Stanford alumni/faculty has gone on to found/co-found such companies as HP, Sun Micro, Adobe, 3Com, Cisco, Yahoo!, Electronic Arts, Netscape, eBay, Google, Nike, Charles Schwab, etc.</p></li>
<li><p>No other school has had a greater impact on the world economy in the last 3 decades. California, if it were a country, would rank the world's 7th largest economy. And the key driver, the Silicon Valley, would not have existed without Stanford. (The birth of the Silicon Valley is attributed to when Stanford engineering dean Terman assisted Hewlet and Packard to found HP.) In 2001, companies founded by Stanford alumni generated 42% of the revenue earned by the 150 largest companies in the Silicon Valley. And this was even before Google went public. (c.f. <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/group/wellspring/economic.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.stanford.edu/group/wellspring/economic.html</a>) Stanford also played a role in the founding of Intel, of course. Andrew Grove still teaches at the business school.</p></li>
<li><p>In 2004, 7 of the Forbes 10 richest men in America under age 40 attented Stanford: Filo & Yang (Yahoo!), Page & Brin (Google), Skoll (eBay), and Tiger Woods.</p></li>
<li><p>Stanford's own president, Hennsesy, is a succesful professor/entrpreneur. MIPS, the company he founded while on sabbatical, was sold for over 300 million dollars.</p></li>
<li><p>There are people who make millionaires at Stanford everyday. Half of America's venture capital is right along Sand Hill Road outside the Stanford Shopping Center.</p></li>
<li><p>Stanford produces oustanding business leaders too. Current CEOs of Pfizer (world's largest pharmaceutical company), Microsoft and Canon, just to name a few. Also the ex-CEO of HP Fiorina.</p></li>
<li><p>Stanford is now the school that others trying hardest to emulate. Yale sent a whole team to Stanford to understand its success story. Harvard's President Summers made it clear that the current science/engineering project in Alston is modeled after Stanford's bio-X/Clark Center Bioengineering program. This was in the Harvard Gazette.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>By Kelly Shue
Published: Thursday, October 7, 2004</p>
<p>The 594-member strong Students for California Relocation of Harvard University jokes that the only problem with Harvard is its East Coast location. But as restaurant owners the world over have learned the hard way, it's "Location, Location, Location!" And being located in Nor'ester Central may just end up being the Achilles heel of mighty Harvard...</p>