I hv come to notice that on every website, harvard is consistently ranked the highest university in every field. However, whenever i look up the reason why - the only answer i get is cos its either old or rich. Is there anything good about harvard considering educational factors. Do they have better facilities ? Do they Have better teachers ? Do they have better courses ? Why is Harvard considered the best university, in terms of actual education ?
The question has been asked and answered in a humber of other CC threads, including this one: http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/harvard-university/237484-what-makes-harvard-great.html
Harvard also supplies their reasons why: https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/hear-our-students/student-blog/7-reasons-why-harvard
One of the best things is the interesting peers- though it can also be hard being surrounded by talent.
Harvard may be considered the “best university” by reputation but not necessarily “in terms of actual education.” As far as “actual education,” there are other legitimate contenders out there that are arguably even better.
Harvard has the largest endowment. That’s an objective fact. Every other aspect of ranking has confounding factors. There is also the time-lag factor. We often still talk about “Cadillac” or “Rolls-Royce” as the epitome of cars, when in fact few people truly believe this any more. And so it might be with universities.,
First, you may want to check your premises. For example, in my year-old copy of U.S. News, Harvard placed 28th in its category in undergraduate engineering – a great showing considering the depth, breadth and rigour of the other included programs, but not first.
You may also want to consider the Harvard undergraduate experience overall. Assuredly it would be great for some, but also uninspiring for others. In The Boston Globe, for instance, a famous Proust Questionnaire respondent mentions his choice of Harvard when asked to name his “greatest regret”:
It isn’t “consistently ranked the highest in every field”. Putting aside the silly rankings game to begin with, which is merely a profitmaking enterprise (particularly USNWR, which exists to sell magazines and advertising, not as an authoritative or unbiased source of objective academic advice to prospective college students but that has been covered in other threads on CC) Harvard for example is not ranked in USNWR’s top 10 for engineering as the previous poster states.
Except for the size of its endowment, there is no area where Harvard is without peers in the world of higher education… It is pretty clearly the oldest college in the United States, but others were accorded “university” status before it was, and the Universidad Real y Pontifical de Mexico (which no longer exists) was founded 80 years before Harvard, so it was nowhere near first in North America.
Even in the academic and professional fields where it is strongest, it always has two or three (or five or six) equally strong competitors. And there are definitely fields where Harvard is not one of the top institutions; the most obvious of these is probably engineering of all types.
What makes Harvard arguably the greatest university in the world today has very little relevance to any individual student. It’s near the top in more fields that any other university (including its top professional schools), and it’s at least decent in a very broad range of fields. Even the most talented students could be educated as well or better elsewhere, especially if they are undergraduates, but there may not be any other single university that is so strong in so many different areas. (That said, Stanford certainly comes close these days.)
You are a HS sophomore. I’d recommend you don’t get fixated on any one school – especially one as competitive in admissions as Harvard. Instead, when the time comes honestly asses your academic stats (including GPA, standardized tests, course rigor) as well as your financial needs and apply to a wide range of reach, match, and safety schools that appear affordable (you will have to run a net price calculator for each school you consider) and that you would be excited to attend. You need to expand your horizons and recognize that there are many wonderful schools out there where you can have a great 4 year experience and get where you want to go in life.
A couple of you have mentioned the size of endowment. While Harvard may have the largest overall endowment, other institutions rank much higher when it comes to the endowment per student, which is a more relevant and significant measure where students and their quality education, financial aid and other support system and experience are concerned. The largest endowment doesn’t mean much when the institution is so spread out that resources will also have to spread out among its many constituents. Here’s the latest endowment per student ranking:
https://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/college-rankings/details/EndowmentPerStudent
Another measurement for gauging the quality of undergrad education and experience is alumni giving where, again, Harvard gets the nod for the most in total amount but not by more relevant measure of alumni giving rate. Here’s the latest ranking of 10 Universities Where the Most Alumni Donate:
As a degree holder from Harvard, I take a huge pride in the institution and I deem it deserving of the world wide reputation that it has been enjoying since its inception. But when it comes to an “actual education,” particularly where undergrad education is concerned, I’d be dishonest if I were to join the rest of chorus in proclaiming Harvard the best in the world when it comes to “actual education.” That’s a myth, a folk legend, once-upon-a-time-in-American-history stuff.
If you want to consider Nobel prizes and many other accomplishments, I would submit MIT, but Harvard had a 225 year head start and has built a seeming insurmountable endowment lead of $22,300,000,000 (14.8B vs 37.1B). It is also difficult to build a prestige lead when you have neither a law school nor a medical school. MIT just does a good job with the basics!
Check this out for MIT: VS Harvard
89 Nobel Laureates…49
58 National Medal of Science winners
29 National Medal of Technology and Innovation winners
48 MacArthur Fellows
15 A. M. Turing Award winners (these are the Math aces)
It was not easy to count out the rests as Harvard does not list them for you.
If you wish to join a long list of winners, you will find many incredible colleges and universities in the mix.
I guess the best thing Harvard offers is the degree that says Harvard and the commensurate respect that it generates. As far as actual education, there are quite a few colleges out there that will give you just as good, and is some cases, a better education.
Harvard is not at all the “best” undergrad experience. It’s reputation is carried by the quality of its graduate and professional schools and by the research output of the faculty.
That’s a folk legend, too. Harvard’s “world wide reputation” is not much more than a century old. For the first century-plus of its existence, it’s sole mission was to train clergymen in Protestant confessions that no one in the world beyond New England recognized or cared about. Even those interested in the peculiarities of colonial theology probably paid more attention to Yale’s Jonathan Edwards and Timothy Dwight than to anyone educated at Harvard.
Over the next century and a half, it morphed into an important finishing school for males in the local elite, several of whom had meaningful roles in the founding generation of the United States. But there were lots of different local elites at that point, and many different, roughly co-equal colleges educating them in different regions. I don’t think anyone outside the U.S. was falling over themselves trying to figure out where John Adams or Elbridge Gerry had been educated. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, maybe, but of course none of them got anywhere near Harvard. (Well, Franklin was at Boston Latin School, so that’s sort of near Harvard.)
Harvard may have started to get some international recognition with the generation of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Louis Agassiz, and certainly increased it with William and Henry James, George Santayana, and James Russell Lowell, but that basically takes you to the dawn of the 20th Century. Harvard was not at all in the forefront of improving the quality of American universities in the mid-19th Century – that would be Cornell and the wave of new universities at the end of the century, including Stanford, Chicago, and Johns Hopkins – but Harvard at least joined the modernizing pack under its heroic president, Charles Eliot. Harvard was a founding member (but not a convening member) of the Association of American Universities, which essentially defined elite research universities in 1900.
Where Harvard was definitely an innovator was in professional education. It was the first to establish a law school, and much later a government school, and a school of education, and it was among the first to establish a medical school and later a business school. But, again, having established a law school and medical school in the early 19th Century, they were basically a mess well into the Eliot era, and the foundation for their current reputation was laid during his presidency.
I think the modern cult of Harvard really started with the Roosevelts and their respective entourages, and then the Kennedys, as well as a bunch of mid-century notables in the world of letters – T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, John Dos Passos, Robert Lowell, e.e. cummings, Thomas Wolfe, Norman Mailer – Leonard Bernstein, lots of celebrity journalists, and the huge advances in medicine, law, and business that the professional schools were making, as well as the Kennedy School’s excellent judgment about which up-and-coming foreign leaders to bet on. Just lots and lots of star power there. But it’s not age-old; it’s at most 3-4 generations old.
It’s not all that great. US News is a subjective opinion based news company. None of their criteria actually measures educational outcomes or quality. It’s based on money spent and popularity.
“Why is Harvard so good ?”
According to a poster on another thread, “because it is considered to be the Stanford of the East”.
Harvard is located in Boston, has money to hire best faculty, prestige to attract best students, rich/powerful/famous alumni to connect graduates with oppurtunities, name cred to impress random people on street and PR expertise to stay in news. Their size is perfect too, not too small, not too big, balanced size. Their research programs are well funded thanks to huge endowment, alumni donors and funding from many sources.
Their holistic story makes students believe they may have a chance, their FA makes students believe they can afford it so application numbers keep increasing and acceptance rates keep falling to maintain number #1 ranking.
@Retiredfarmer - the Alan M. Turing Award is for contributions to computer science specifically, not mathematics in general. It is given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The top award in pure and applied mathematics is generally regarded to be the Fields Medal, which is given every four years.
^If you go by the number of graduates who went on to win Turing Award, here are the top ten:
- Berkeley—11
- Harvard/Stanford—9
- Princeton—8
- MIT/Caltech—6
- CMU—5
- Cambridge/UMich—4
- Oxford/UChicago/Duke/NYU—3
Considering the number of CS students at Harvard I think it has done very well too.
Harvard has some of the smartest and most talented students in the world.
It has some of the best and biggest names in nearly every intellectual field.
You would be surrounded by fascinating people!
It has endless resources and the best of everything to offer its students. You want to do something in research or a club? They can make it possible for you!
IMO, it’s silly to say it’s not among the best universities in the world. It is.
But that does not mean it is the best college for everyone. There are a lot of great colleges, and each student needs to find the best fit.