Torn between Harvard and Princeton

Colleges and Universities A-Z Harvard University
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<p>I would strongly suggest to get your feet on campus at both. This will be the best way IMO. This is your choice only - not your parents, your friends, or the schools themselves. Asking others which they should pick is like asking your neighbor what car you should get period. This is your decision.</p>

<p>While both are academic, Princeton is a little more academic than Harvard from what I know (take it with a grain of salt). Personally I like this about Harvard. </p>

<p>Harvard’s reputation is worlds over princeton frankly, especially overseas. The vast majority of students who are accepted to both choose Harvard. The only schools that have real competition for Harvard are Stanford and Yale, and even both those schools have majorities going to Harvard. I don’t have the link with me, but there is a page on about.com that shows this. Reputation is important as far as choosing among schools, don’t let anyone try to make you believe other wise. Whether you agree with this mentality is another matter, but like it or not, reputation is a big factor - by most people’s opinions, including my own, it’s by far the biggest factor. What are you going to get at Princeton that you won’t get at Harvard?</p>

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<p>^ The amount of misinformation coming from 17-year-olds on CC is really astounding. You can’t imagine how silly it sounds to people who have actual experience in the corridors of power, as it were, when students say things as silly as Mr. TheGekko.</p>

<p>Sure, reputation can be important . . . if you are comparing Harvard to, say, Sewanee or East Podunk State. If you are comparing Harvard to Princeton, the reputation difference (to the extent it exists) is negligible to start with, and completely irrelevant at the level of any individual student. Completely, totally, unmistakably irrelevant, no matter what any high school senior says.</p>

<p>Neither Harvard nor Princeton, standing alone, entitles any graduate to a particular job or graduate school admission. Their graduates have to go out into the world and compete, with other graduates of the same college and graduates of other colleges. No employers or universities that you care about fill up on one college before moving to another. There are no positions worth having, anywhere in the world, that are open to Harvard graduates and closed to Princeton graduates. None. There are no positions worth having, anywhere in the world, where a Harvard diploma will trump a more-qualified Princeton grad. If Harvard’s reputation is “worlds” over Princeton, it is with cab drivers and plumbers, not with people who hire young people for entry-level professional jobs, or the jobs beyond those. At any enterprise larger than, say, a fraternity chapter, an executive who systematically hired Harvard graduates and rejected Princeton graduates would be fired as incompetent, and deservedly so.</p>

<p>Either college will give a student plenty of lustre, and plenty of opportunities. But it’s up to the student to take advantage of that, and going where you are happiest and feel most comfortable, most engaged, and most inspired is going to mean that you will learn more, achieve more, and be a better candidate for whatever you want to do next. The truly minuscule aggregate reputation difference between Harvard and Princeton can’t even begin to make up for any meaningful difference in those factors, if they favor whichever school you think is on the minus side of the reputation balance.</p>

<p>I don’t have a dog in this hunt. Personally, I would choose Harvard. But I would choose Harvard because I like its energy and style more, and its English Lit faculty, not because I think Harvard confers any advantage Princeton doesn’t.</p>

<p>ADDING: There is ONE area where Princeton unquestionably has a meaningful advantage over Harvard: its alumni loyalty and engagement. I know many more people who have gotten something from the Princeton old-boy network than people who have gotten anything from a Harvard old-boy network, and I know lots more Harvardians than Princetonians in general. If what you care about is giving yourself a hand in getting fancy jobs, that difference absolutely swamps any vague reputation difference in Harvard’s favor.</p>

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<p>Don’t listen to Americans who act as know-it-alls about Harvard’s reputation around the world. I have done a fair share of my travel with my Harvard degree, and Harvard’s name has always much more effect on the average foreigner than any other US university. In several of the countries that I have been to, the Harvard brand was considered to be in its own league even though some other schools were also known to be excellent.
In my experience, most foreigners would assume that you were rejected from Harvard if you told them you went to Princeton.</p>

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<p>^And why would you want to impress a cab driver in Paris? The people abroad who might be hiring Ivy League graduates will know.</p>

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<p>How would you know that? Do you travel with people with degrees from other elite universities for comparison? Or do you have degrees from these as well?</p>

<p>I have no idea about Princeton, but I’ve heard from foreigners that MIT has as much or more cache’ as Harvard in their countries. That may or may not be true; I have no idea, but I doubt that Harvard has “much more” effect on the average foreigner than any other US university. </p>

<p>From your post, it sounds like you are an American too. Perhaps, some foreigners should be chiming in on this prestige issue. I’m with JHS here; I don’t think it has a significant difference, but I am open-minded.</p>

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<p>I would select Harvard. You may want to spend time reading about Princeton’s grade deflation policy and how this will impact your graduate school options. </p>

<p>Good luck and congratulations on such wonderful options.</p>

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<p>For all the whining people do about how Princeton’s grade-deflation policy affects students’ graduate school options you would think maybe it had actually affected Princeton students’ graduate school options. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t. And by “graduate school,” let’s be clear that we mean law school and medical school, the only kinds of graduate schools where undergraduate GPA is thought to have crucial significance. I would be interested if someone could show evidence that Princeton students suffer when they apply to law or medical school. (And be wary of absolute numbers – Princeton has a much higher proportion of engineers than Harvard or Yale do, and until recently a meaningfully smaller student body, so it systematically produced fewer law and medical school applicants both under the current grading system and before it was implimented.)</p>

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<p>I’ll chime in for industry. In finance, for schools where we recruit on campus (like Princeton), resumes are reviewed by school teams and only compared to other students from that same school. The reviewers are usually alums. Once students are selected for interview, grades have little to do with selection.</p>

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<p>JHS, I always appreciate how balanced and well-informed your posts are, especially since I know you’re not a fan of Princeton’s style. (On some issues, I think your opinions re: our style are a bit outdated, but that’s another story.) OP, he’s absolutely right about grade deflation–it doesn’t seem to have meaningfully impacted professional school admissions, and even the overall GPA has only dropped something like .07/4.00. Personally, I have yet to feel the effects of it at all–which is not to say that Princeton is easy! Quite the opposite–although many students like to complain about it. And honestly, that’s the most annoying thing about grade deflation: People are always talking or writing articles about it on campus.</p>

<p>Also:

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<p>Plenty (and vice-versa). They’re different experiences; it makes sense they will both offer things the other lacks. Princeton is smaller, a bit more academic, suburban, lacks a real graduate presence, and has a visible social/party structure. Harvard is larger, more focused on extracurricular life, urban, the graduate student body and programs are very much a part of the experience, and the social life is less obvious. Then there are differences of different departments: Princeton “wins” on comp lit, creative writing, (I think) classics, and engineering, and we have a school of public policy. Harvard “wins” on English, anthro, and a couple other disciplines I’m not informed about, and it has the resources of the business school and the Kennedy School of Government. </p>

<p>Neither is necessarily better–whatever that means–but they are unmistakeably different. (For what it’s worth, I preferred the idea of Harvard–independent, idiosyncratic, urban savants–over that of Princeton, but would have been unhappy at Harvard and have grown to absolutely love Princeton. For me, I knew the smaller classes, tighter community, and strength in politics and creative writing would ultimately make me happier. Doesn’t mean I think those things are worth more on any objective scale than the Harvard experience.) </p>

<p>As for international reputation–I’ll ignore the matter of whether differences exist entirely–if you’re getting a job straight out of college, it’s likely to come either from an alum/family connection or from on-campus recruiting. In other words, people hiring you will know the value of your degree, even if the job is located overseas. Moreover, government and international organizations recruit heavily from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy, and opportunities to study/intern abroad–for free!–abound.</p>

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<p>PLEASE DEFINE: Several posters on here have said that Princeton is more “academic” than Harvard. What do you mean by that? What does “academic” mean when comparing colleges? How can Harvard not be “as academic”? Thanks for any clarification.</p>

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<p>If you can’t choose based on a program, choose based on location!</p>

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<p>This may be what people are talking about: I would say UChicago is more academic than Yale because overall, students at UChicago seem more focused on course work than Yale students who likely spend more time than UChicago students on extracurricular activities. Not to say students at Yale don’t focus on their studies and UChicago students don’t do an activities on campus. It just seemed to me that talking to students on both campuses, Yale students seemed more involved and UChicago students seemed more course focused.</p>

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<p>lifelearner: I think what has been meant by the term “academic” is the focus of the students–is it oriented more to the life of the mind per se, rather than on the outside world. </p>

<p>There is an old story of someone coming to a meeting with the president of Harvard. The fellow said he was there to see the president of Harvard. He was informed that unfortunately “The President is in Washington to see Mr Roosevelt.”
The story has two points–one, that the revolving door between Harvard and government (and other outside interests) is very strong and is long standing, more than anywhere else I know and secondly, that Harvard sees itself superior to any of its outside interests–its arrogance (and this is from someone who has been here for decades and loves it dearly) knows no bounds.</p>

<p>If one uses Chicago and Harvard as examples of the two poles-- Harvard’s outward focus is matched by Chicago’s inward one. This is seen in the type of student each school admits–exaggerated one could say that Harvard students are more interested in changing the world and Chicago students are more interested in understanding the world.</p>

<p>Of course there are people such as Mr Friedman at Chicago whose interest and career span both inside and outside of Chicago and scholars at Harvard who wish to be left to their studies without any applicability to the outside world. </p>

<p>In the grand scheme that is this thread, the point is being made that P’ton is closer to the Chicago model than the Harvard model. </p>

<p>I’m not sure that is true-- I know more about UC and H (and they are more polar in their orientations) than P-- but that is what has been meant by “academic”</p>

<p>.</p>