Seeing how few CS majors there are at UChicago I would consider there being in the top 10 stunning.
@Engineer80
Thank you!
@Engineer80
Thank you!
@jzducol
According to the MIT website they have 15 A. M. Turing Award winners.
^That is the number of faculty winners.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The best college is the one that’s best for you- your style, your learning, your ancillary interests, how you fare with competition, the actual opportunities in your major (not just others’ accomplishments,) and more, including the fun you can have. It’s not so much about the career you want. But outside the generous colleges, it does matter that you can afford the costs.
Do some digging to find the right matches for you. (And then, where you match what they want- which is a whole lot more than wanting them and your stats.) Yeah, first, you have to know yourself. Then, you need to know the college better than their rep, their media ranking, what awards “some” win- or what others think.
Am I the only one who is not impressed or at least worried about the Harvard undergraduate student body? Obviously not all (my brother went to Harvard and I like him very much), but in life one tends to bump into people, and those from Harvard are usually incredibly self centered and arrogant. It didn’t help that there was a poster recently on CC who was accepted to Questbridge match (which in my mind is an incredible gift) but then applied SCEA to Harvard, was accepted, and then went on to apply and get accepted at Princeton, Yale, etc. I was certain he would attend Harvard because in my mind only a Harvard student would expend that much energy in return for the attention and bragging rights or whatever it was that poster was looking for. My husband refers to Harvard as an ***hole factory. I wouldn’t go that far. it is an amazing institution with brilliant faculty and resources. The students are highly intelligent and often go on to be extremely successful. I’m not sure I would want my child to consider applying there as an undergraduate though because I get a bad feeling about the students (she’s not interested currently, though that may change). Am I just reading too much from several random encounters and a student on CC, or is there some truth to why I’m feeling this way?
Harvard does not participate in Questbridge and its SCEA app deadline is at least one month before QB results. I cannot figure out how such a student exists.
@cafe9999 by my observation they are not a braggy bunch, Harvard College graduates seem to have the opposite problem (not so good about Harvard imo): they don’t seem to carry a lot of school pride; a lot of them cannot bring themselves to say they went to Harvard.
@jzducol The student was a finalist but chose not to do match which is allowed, though most who do that apply REA or ED to a QB partner, but they are free to do whatever they want.
Harvard has fantastic name recognition. Everyone has hear of it.
The only correct answer is Research. (That is what most academic rankings are based upon.)
“Harvard has fantastic name recognition. Everyone has hear [sic] of it.”
No doubt, but it does not answer the OP’s question:
“Why is Harvard considered the best university, in terms of ACTUAL EDUCATION?” (caps mine)
Don’t know why, but Harvard is not even listed for their research on this website: see https://www.bestcollegereviews.org/top-research-universities/
A more reliable listing might be that from the National Science foundation which list Harvard as number eight. Interesting eye opener. It is Johns Hopkins by a very wide lead! See https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=rankingBySource&ds=herd
I think we assume a lot about famous colleges. This is why students need to form their own relevant questions and do their homework. It is a much bigger world than popular opinion might indicate.
To be honest, best university is a myth. Same school whose acceptance inflated your self esteem, can ruin your self confidence if you don’t fit in.
Same school where one is going for free and finding lucrative jobs can drain your parent’s retirement stash, put you under debt and gives you a theater degree which hardly pays your basic mortgage.
Its highest ranking school for sure but best school varies for everyone.
There are plenty schools with better individual departments than Harvard and better undergraduate experience than Harvard offers. Harvard has money, a lot of rich/famous alums, and a not insignificant mythology (some of it of its own making) which keeps it in the headlines. But headlines by definition don’t tell the whole story!
simple: look at the criteria.
A better analysis of academia, IMO, is the (dated) NRC report of grad programs. Count the # of top 10 departments at H, or even #1.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/NRC-Rankings-Overview-/124743
In fact, of the academic programs that were ranked, Harvard was rated #1 in 19 departments, Berkeley was ranked #1 in 16 departments, Stanford-11, and five unis were tied with 7 ranked #1 departments (Columbia, Michigan, MIT, Princeton & Yale).
In other words, the academic types consider H top dog, and that is based on academic research.
@bluebayou Hmmmm since diversity is part of these ranking does the more diverse and international you are the better your academic score??? Don’t think the Asians suing Harvard would agree.
Having the most of grad programs ranked top doesn’t mean much as far as the undergrad quality education goes. Harvard and other top grad schools (Berkeley, Stanford, etc.) are pretty much structured on a trickle down educational system. So what if these schools have abundance of Nobel Prize, Pulitzer, Turing, etc. winners when grad students take the most benefits while the undergrads are hardly taught by them? This is why Berkeley earns the world-wide reputation based on its strength in research and grad programs but its undergrad ranking tanks. Harvard, Stanford, etc. have the private institutional resources to support their undergrad programs, but their trickle down undergrad programs can’t compete with those institutions that are exclusively dedicated to provide the highest quality education to the undergrad students.
Don’t know anything about Harvard, except when I was in undergraduate market class, our instructor used Harvard business school study cases as our study material and assignments. When I went to a prestigious university for MBA, and again the market class used Harvard business school study cases as our blue print for class. It seemed to me that Harvard had lots original innovation ideas and other universities just followed that and improved upon it. I knew the risky investment of repackaging lots of subprime mortgage was originate from the Harvard business model and a very safe investment, but when all other top business schools also started to teach their students the same thing, basically resulted the 2008 mortgage crisis a decade later.
When I was at Harvard for my grad degree, I happened to use many of their business school case studies, but I don’t see any correlation between these case studies and “the 2008 mortgage crisis a decade later.”