<p>Smaller liberal arts schools are going to give you an education equal in quality or better than what Harvard or any of the Ivies would give you. Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, and Pomona come to mind.</p>
<p>Agreed - the thought that Harvard is somehow “above” engineering seems a bit arrogant.</p>
<p>That said, I’d say the school that’s “better” than Harvard is the school you’d prefer to go to over Harvard, for whatever reason.</p>
<p>Harvard is just like the iPhone. While there are better options, like android, people seem fixated on Harvard, or the iPhone, because of culture, ignorance, and stereotypes. But that’s not saying that Harvard isn’t good. It depends on major and other factors. You want to major in engineering uc berkely is way better than Harvard.</p>
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This type of elitist/arogant attitude is another reason some students choose to apply elsewhere.</p>
<p>Having a top engineering program obviously is not synonymous with “trade school”, nor does having a liberal arts emphasis exclude a school from having a top engineering program. Harvard clearly takes improving their engineering program seriously, as they should with an increasingly technology-based world and >13% of the new class of admitted students saying they plan to enter engineering. Harvard has made several major changes over the past 7 years to facilitate this including adding a real engineering school instead of a division, having a plan to get more engineering faculty members, providing more engineering classes, and increasing the number of engineering majors from 1 to 4.</p>
<p>What could be better than Harvard? There is one simple answer in my mind and that is to pursue a career in something that has more potential than years waisted dreaming of pursuing something when they already could be doing it. Take for example the 3 recent hs grads who turned down Harvard, Princeton and MIT and in turn started an innovative rental car service; others such as Zuckerburg and Gates obviously are also good examples here. It takes courage and a lot of guts to do this, and it could be admirable.</p>
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<p>This begs the question of what learning environment is best for the best students. Sure, a lazy student may not get much out of a selective, expensive school. A diligent student might get more out of any alternative. But what is best for a very talented, motivated student for whom money is not an issue? Is every college equally good for such a person? I don’t think so (though I’m sure Harvard isn’t equally suited for every such person).</p>
<p>It’s a cop-out to say that everything depends on the student’s efforts. Good students and good professors need resources. Harvard has resources. People can differ about how they allocate them (engineering programs v. FA v. buildings v. research etc.), therefore many will conclude somewhere else is a better fit (or just plain “better”).</p>
<p>I believe that my daughter’s college is “better” (for her) than Harvard. Even if she had gotten into Harvard (she didn’t even apply), I would still rather she be where she is, because it’s a great school and a perfect fit for her in all respects. I think she’s getting just as good an education, and probably a better college experience (by her standards), than she would anywhere else.</p>
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<p>Multiple things wrong with this. First of all, you have a fundamental misunderstanding about how an endowment works - it’s not a bank account, as most of its funds are tied to a specific purpose. Harvard cannot legally spend that money on anything but its donor-specified purpose. The unrestricted portion of its endowment - $5-6 billion - is also largely tied up supporting stuff that doesn’t have a restricted fund to support it. Thus, Harvard can’t just move the money to a new column, in this case “engineering.”</p>
<p>Second, Harvard does want to become a top engineering school - desperately. It’s been left in the dust by Stanford, which manages to be a top liberal arts school with a top engineering school. It’s left in the dust by its cross-town rival MIT. Heck, it’s left in the dust by tiny Princeton. And even its long-time rival Yale is well on its way to becoming a top engineering school. Suffice to say, Harvard strives to be the best in whatever it chooses to do. I won’t say that Harvard wants to be the best in everything - for example, agricultural studies aren’t something that Harvard cares about - but everything that Harvard does choose to pursue, it wants to be the best. Indeed, that’s true for every school out there. If Harvard weren’t serious about engineering, it wouldn’t have created an entire school for it.</p>
<p>Finally, even if its endowment were useful here, it couldn’t just “make” a top engineering school. That’s because engineering is fundamentally different from, say, anthropology or comparative literature. Unlike those disciplines, engineering is facilities-intensive, and such facilities are also very expensivep. What’s more, the going rate for top profs in engineering is much higher, because they could all have a very lucrative career in industry, unlike those in the humanities and social sciences. And top talent in engineering (NAE-level talent) is scarcer, so there’s truly a bidding war among the top schools for the top engineering profs. Add on top of that all the costs of staff, support for grad students, etc. and you can see why it’s not so easy to just make a top engineering school pop out of thin air.</p>
<p>If Harvard didn’t care about its relative place in engineering, it wouldn’t be about to launch a massive capital campaign largely dedicated to bolstering it. That science complex in Allston? Funny how similar in scope it is to Stanford’s soon-to-be-completed Science & Engineering Quad. ;)</p>
<p>P.S. let’s not pretend that Harvard’s lack of individual engineering departments and subsequent offering of general engineering degrees is because it’s “taking the high road” on engineering education and emphasizing a liberal arts approach. It’s because Harvard doesn’t have the money to make these departments out of scratch. By the way its competitors also emphasize a liberal arts education even in engineering.</p>
<p>Again, the principle is that if Harvard wanted, it definitely could, but it’s not its goal to have a top engineering program like other schools have it. Harvard is not eager to go with the crowd. Take EdX, for instance: without setting up any satellite campuses elsewhere, and after noticing what other top schools such as Yale, NYU, and even Stanford with its failed NYC bid, were trying to accomplish with that kind of outreach, Harvard has become the major player in the field of online education and international outreach. Harvard observes first, then acts. Try to understand: if Harvard deems it proper, it will go after. If not, the others can go. Simple.</p>
<p>I think it is obvious based on the info provided in Harvard’s own website that for most of its long history, engineering was not important to Harvard at all. If you wanted to be an engineer you went down the street to MIT. That was there attitude. But times have changed.
Whether it is because of Stanford’s stature or just an adjustment to a changing world where the intersection of science/engineering/technology and Harvard’s traditional strengths are crucial to solving the world’s biggest challenges, who knows?
I think it is a great development though! Should be interesting to watch…</p>
<p>uddhavagita, you didn’t respond to any of my points, or present any evidence that supports your claim. You just reiterated your strange assertions.</p>
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<p>Harvard does want to, and it can, and it’s trying, and it’s well on its way.</p>
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<p>Proof?</p>
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<p>Funny juxtaposition there. I’ll point out that EdX was established long after such initiatives as Coursera, Udacity, SCPD, etc. at Stanford, not to mention the many other initiatives at other universities. Not eager to go with the crowd? Right.</p>
<p>Here’s something from a Crimson article on the newly established SEAS:</p>
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<p>Sure as heck seems like Harvard’s bent on following the crowd and having a top engineering school.</p>
<p>And this article shows that your assertion about the endowment [edit: about everything] is just wishful thinking:</p>
<p>[Stretch</a> Marks | News | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/5/27/seas-school-faculty-graduate/]Stretch”>Stretch Marks | News | The Harvard Crimson)</p>
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<p>As I said, Harvard can’t just pull a top engineering school out of its … endowment. But it’s trying really, really hard to compete with the likes of MIT and Stanford, as that article demonstrates quite well. It also discusses exactly the same challenges I highlighted before, namely funding, facilities, faculty, and grad student support.</p>
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<p>I promise, it’s really not that painful to admit that Harvard may not be the best at something, but still wants to be. No school is perfect - even Stanford falls behind Harvard in areas like public health; Berkeley in medical sciences; MIT in the humanities; Princeton in professional schools; and so on.</p>
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<p>Multiple things wrong with this. ;)</p>
<p>I think it’s hardly a coincidence that Harvard lacks a highly-reputed engineering program and that, just 2 miles down the road, one of the two bests institutes of technology in the world has one of the worlds best programs in engineering. Harvard students majoring in engineering can also take classes at MIT which aren’t offered at Harvard, which shouldn’t be too difficult to do given that, once again, they’re only two miles away from each other.</p>
<p>Secondly, while i think you’re right that Harvard currently wants to have one of the world’s best engineering programs, I think it’s pretty clear that it didn’t care as much about it in the past. You mention that Harvard is about to launch a massive campaign which is aimed at boosting the engineering program. What’s prevented Harvard from launching such a campaign in the past? Probably nothing more than lack of interest. This refutes your ‘Harvard wants to be the best at everything it does’ point, but I think this answer is much more plausible than Harvard lacking the, at least potential capital to fund such a department. While it’s humorous to imagine Harvard and its engineering department personified and, imaging it’s engineering department begging for more funding seeing Harvard, ashamed, pulling out two empty front pockets, it hardly seems plausible. While Stanford leads the world in university fundraising, Harvard isn’t much behind it. </p>
<p>Furthermore, the sources you cite talking about Harvard’s lack of resources for its engineering department seem like scare tactics designed to scare alumni in donating large swaths of cash so that the value of the Harvard name is not diluted. It’s probably meant to boost the aforementioned campaign you cited earlier.</p>
<p>As a final point, the reasons for Stanford’s, and Cal’s, top ranked engineering department is its proximity to Silicon Valley. Engineering is much more of a central part of Stanford than it is, and has been, a part of Harvard. This can be seen in its history, and also in the successes of its alumni.</p>
<p>I’d conjecture (this isn’t a point) that Harvard finally deciding to boost its engineering department has more to do with Yale boosting theirs than anything else. I think the Harvard-Yale rivalry is significantly stronger than the Harvard-Stanford rivalry, or any others. Harvard alumni probably hate being behind Yale in anything they do, so i wouldn’t be surprised if this was the spark that lead Harvard to finally decide to fund a world-class engineering department.</p>
<p>Yale has tried for a while to get the best STEM students but in vein. I have seen many cases that Yale lost them to HPSM. The intention of trying may be still good.</p>
<p>Harvard should know better that they don’t have Yale’s problem, and hence should not worry about it.</p>
<p>ummmm, surprised there are no Princeton fans chiming in here. Princeton has a far better undergraduate program (not everything is grabbed by frantic graduate students), higher alumni support, usually better USNWR ranking. </p>
<p>About 50% of kids admitted to both Harvard and Stanford choose Stanford. They clearly don’t think H is the best, at least for them.</p>
<p>MIT and Caltech could certainly chime in too.</p>
<p>and of course Yale. But rivalries keep everyone on their toes.</p>
<p>Let’s see.</p>
<p>Stanford.</p>
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<p>Looks like we have a severe case of try-hardom in the house. </p>
<p>Enjoy LSU kid.</p>
<p>Another vote for Georgetown here. </p>
<p><em>cough</em></p>
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If you are referring to USNWR rankings, the grad rankings are weighted as follows:</p>
<p>25% - Faculty Resources
25% - Research Activity
25% - Engineering School Peer Assessment
15% - Recruiter Assessment
10% - Selectivity</p>
<p>Being located in Silicon Valley may correlate with the assessments, but it is by no means the primary reason for the high rankings. Plenty of other Silicon Valley universities are not ranked especially well.</p>
<p>Furthermore being located in Silicon Valley is not just a case of being in the right place at the right time. Instead Stanford was the key catalyst for the creation of Silicon Valley. It’s more Silicon Valley is a testament to Stanford’s long history of engineering and entrepreneurship. Back in the 1930s, after being disappointed that Stanford engineering grads needed to go to the east coast for jobs, an EE prof at Stanford focused on creating new technology and encouraged his students to start new companies. His students formed several successful companies. The most well known is Hewlett Packard. The Palo Alto garage in which HP started is sometimes called “the Birthplace of Silicon Valley.” Later that professor (Terman) became Dean of Engineering at Stanford and continued to encourage new technology and entrepreneurship. The Wikipedia entry on Silicon Valley calls him “the father of Silicon Valley.” That style has continued at Stanford for decades along with Stanford grads continuing to create numerous well known tech companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Cisco. I was in a related double masters program at Stanford that fostered tech entrepreneurship by combining degrees in engineering tech with engineering business management. MIT probably has something similar with tech companies being started in the Boston area.</p>
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I believe Yale added its new SEAS school shortly after Harvard added its SEAS school. However, both schools new each others plans, so it could have gone either way. I agree that the timing is close enough that one school was imitating the other. An April 2008 article in the Crimson states, </p>
<p>“Following in the footsteps of universities including Harvard, Yale University will create a School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Yale President Richard C. Levin announced Monday.”</p>
<p>I have yet to meet, or hear of, anyone who has turned down Harvard College for Georgetown. </p>
<p>Has it ever happened? Oh, I suppose anything has happened at least once. But it’s a more-or-less astronomical event.</p>
<p>Cue anonymous Georgetownies who will say they turned down (or, more laughably, WOULD turn down) Harvard.</p>
<p>Get real.</p>
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<p>I actually know exactly 14 and a half people who have done this.</p>
<p>Don’t you have prep class to go to, young’un?</p>