<p>Why do people want to go to Harvard? Like what reasons besides the prestige and campus? What programs and such make people want to attend Harvard?
Thanks</p>
<p>Prestige, Quality of education, Nobel Laureates, world famous professors and scientists, world famous faculty in general, awesome labs (for science people), and in general you will be around other people who have worked hard to get into Harvard.</p>
<p>P.S. I am not really wanting to go the Harvard, my logic can be applied to any prestigious college.</p>
<p>As they used to say about Mount Everest, “**ecause it is there.”</p>
<p>Harvard is the oldest, most famous college in America. By nearly any putative measure of college quality (average class size, entering test scores, faculty compensation, faculty awards and prizes, library size, 4 year graduation rate, financial aid, average debt at graduation, annual research expenditures, PhD productivity, graduate admissions, alumni earnings, endowment per student, etc) Harvard is at or near the top. So there are good, objective reasons behind its prestige.</p>
<p>As for specific “programs and such”, the arts & science curriculum is pretty much the same as it is most other colleges. Harvard does not seem to have any curricular schtick like Brown’s Open Curriculum, Columbia’s Core, the Williams College tutorial system, or the Swarthmore honors program.</p>
<p>Prestige is certainly a reason people choose Harvard. Location in Cambridge doesn’t hurt. Your fellow students will, for the most part, be accomplished and interesting people. And a Harvard degree and the contacts you make there will likely open up doors for the rest of your life. My friend did not think that he got the best undergrad education at Harvard, but he is glad he went there.</p>
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<p>No - When it comes to quality of classroom instruction Harvard is nowhere near the top in any list, and Harvard undergraduates would be some of the first to admit this. In the Princeton Review rankings schools like Mount Holyoke, Reed, Williams, Kenyon, and Wittenberg get high marks for classroom experience and quality of teaching; Harvard doesn’t even show up on these lists.</p>
<p>Here’s a fun list of reasons to want to go to Harvard put together by posters on the Harvard board:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/10804400-post181.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/10804400-post181.html</a></p>
<p>Grad schools and employers respect Harvard’s choice of students.</p>
<p>Our elder D graduated from there in '10; our younger D is a senior there now. There’s certainly something to be said for the academics, the institutional support for travel and research, and the financial aid, but the key to the Harvard experience to me is the peer group. The students are very talented and they make the classroom content rich, as you would expect, but more importantly, they make things happen. Our Ds have done things such as hosting hundreds of HS students for a week at a Boston hotel for the “Harvard Model Congress” or teaching a three-week seminar in Shanghai with the “Harvard Seminar for Youth Leadership in China.” When I’ve asked who’s in charge of those programs, the answer inevitably is “we are,” meaning the students. Students come up with ideas, get seed funding, and carry off almost preposterous projects - Off-Broadway-quality theatre productions, the only college-based Homeless Shelter in America, draining the dorm’s pool and converting it into a stage to host operas, etc. The remarkable thing is not merely that the students take on these projects and make them successful, but that they come to see this kind of goal- and project-setting as the norm, rather than as unlikely dreams. That, to me, is what seems to set the Harvard experience apart from the typical college experience.</p>
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<p>peer group - it still depends
[Kicked</a> Out of Harvard - The Daily Beast](<a href=“http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/07/17/drugs-murder-race-and-harvard.html]Kicked”>http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/07/17/drugs-murder-race-and-harvard.html)</p>
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<p>Thank you to all of you. Anymore programs or things that make Harvard unique?</p>
<p>…,.bump</p>
<p>^^What, one hundred and thirty five reasons (post #7) weren’t enough?</p>
<p>Bump…</p>
<p>I believe that someone endowed Harvard money so that they could serve ice-cream at every evening meal (at the Union). At least, that is what I was told, when I was there. The ice cream was great!</p>
<p>Overall, I found the quality of food served at the Union to be quite high- another reason to attend…but then again, I was raised by feral wolves who did not cook/prepare formal meals.</p>
<p>Regarding the amazing “peer group” - when I was there, one of my peers stabbed her roommate to death and then killed herself. Kinda scary-intense; not sure if she had participated in the Harvard Student Congress or workshops on leadership before she became a murderer.</p>