<p>Peeling back the “prestige” label a bit and peeking underneath:</p>
<p>It has already been mentioned that Harvard was the first college established in what is now the US, and it has been continuously operating since then. The Massachusetts political elite was extremely important in the founding and development of the United States, and they were all educated at Harvard. Eight U.S. Presidents, including the current one and his predecessor, have had Harvard degrees, far more than any other university.</p>
<p>It is the wealthiest private nonprofit institution in the history of the world, besides the Catholic Church.</p>
<p>A certain amount of its prestige derives from its professional schools. It had one of the first law schools in the country, at which the modern method of legal training developed. It also had one of the first graduate business schools and professional medical schools. Its law and business schools are meaningfully bigger than their nearest competitors (except Penn’s Wharton School), meaning that they have produced a lot more alumni. Five of the nine current Supreme Court Justices are Harvard law alumni (it used to be six). Yale has a very prestigious law school, but it is 1/3 the size of Harvard’s, and its business school is of recent vintage. Princeton does not have law, business, or medical schools. The places that could conceivably match up with Harvard in this regard – Penn, Columbia, Chicago, UVa, Stanford, Michigan – are nowhere near as rich, or in the case of Stanford a relatively new arrival on the scene, and in any event still have smaller schools than Harvard across the board…</p>
<p>Harvard was not the first elite private university to open its doors to immigrants and non-WASPs – that would probably be Cornell – but it was one of the first, with the result that in the middle of the 20th Century its graduates’ accomplishments outshone that of its nearest competitors. Harvard was also relatively early to put non-WASPs on its faculty in significant numbers. And, unlike Yale and Princeton, it had a women’s college since the 19th Century.</p>
<p>Over the past generation, it seems like urban universities have become steadily more attractive both to students and to faculty. Harvard almost certainly has the best urban campus in the country. Most of its close urban competitors – Yale, Columbia, Penn, Berkeley – had much more serious neighborhood deterioration issues in the 70s, and to a large extent still do. The student protest era of the late 60s and early 70s also scarred Harvard less than places like Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Berkeley, Stanford.</p>
<p>And, finally, Harvard does not have the best faculty in every discipline, but it has assembled faculties that are among the best in more disciplines than any other university.</p>