<p>I am an athletic recruit that has been offered sponsored slots at both Harvard and Yale. I have visited both, but still cannot make a decision. I am looking for opinions on what is a better school overall.</p>
<p>Congratulations, pacman. You’re in an enviable position, but it’s a tough choice. Do a Google search on CC with the keywords “Harvard or Yale” and you’ll come up with lots of threads started by students who were making the same decision. </p>
<p>H and Y are more similar than different, but I think one of Yale’s main distinctions and advantages over any other school is the fantastic Residential College system. </p>
<p>But I’m a parent, so my experience is second hand. I’m sure students and alums will weigh in. Can you talk a bit more about what’s important to you (besides your sport)? In the meantime, you can start looking at some past threads.</p>
<p>I would say that a lot depends on your sport. If (for example) it’s football, the differences between the football programs will probably be more important to your quality of life than the other differences between Yale and Harvard. If it’s a sport that doesn’t dominate your life the same way, and you really can’t decide, flip a coin. You can’t lose.</p>
<p>Harvard imo.</p>
<p>FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU.</p>
<p>Seriously though, go to Harvard.
Boston > New Haven.</p>
<p>^ Haha, /b/tard at CC?
Don’t believe it.</p>
<p>@OP - Have you talked to alumni from either school? Might want to consider doing that if you really are stressing about this choice.</p>
<p>Ho-hum. You could look at any of the hundreds of old threads that discuss this. But anyway . . . </p>
<p>Hunt is right. If you have a clear preference for one coach or program over the other, it should probably swamp any of the truly marginal differences between these really very similar institutions. Generally, that shouldn’t be the case, but between these two schools you really can’t go wrong, so any basis for choosing (including a coin flip) is perfectly fine.</p>
<p>The following is a summary of conventional-wisdom relative differences between them. With one exception, “relative” is a very important qualifier – if one school is 100 in any category, the other is somewhere between 92-99.</p>
<p>Harvard advantages:</p>
<p>Cambridge/Boston (much spiffier than New Haven)
Math, lab sciences, economics
Name recognition (for your Uncle Joe, or your cab driver in Shanghai)
If your sport is played outdoors, you can walk to the fieldhouse/fields from campus
Freshman seminars are cool
Lampoon (and its Hollywood connections)</p>
<p>Yale advantages:</p>
<p>Student participation in arts, drama, music
Literature (except English, which is probably a push), history, most social sciences
Residential college system works slightly better than house system
Advising
Directed Studies is a nice program if you wish there were a core curriculum
Slightly more faculty contact
Students tend to be happier
More purely social clubs, fraternities
Better food</p>
<p>Harvard disadvantages:</p>
<p>The idea of “Harvard” is a bit more oppressive than the idea of “Yale”; some Harvard students can get anxious if they don’t think they are living up to “Harvard”
Academic competition is not so bad, but competition at key organizations (e.g., Crimson, Lampoon) can be cutthroat</p>
<p>Yale disadvantages:</p>
<p>New Haven (it’s not as bad as it looks, but it just isn’t wonderful)
Fields are a couple of miles away
Yale has something of a chip on its shoulder vis a vis Harvard</p>
<p>We know somebody on the Yale football team, and I have to say that he’s not having the typical Yale experience; what he’s living is quite different in many respects. I suspect this is less true with other sports.</p>
<p>hunt – better or worse than typical?</p>
<p>@jhs. IMO, Yale’s English Dept. is more forward-looking than Harvard’s, in general, in large part thanks to Yale’s concerted effort to get and keep younger scholars. Average age of Yale profs in English is probably about a decade younger than Harvard’s, Harold Bloom notwithstanding. Just sayin’</p>
<p>Although of course I don’t want to hijack this thread…</p>
<p>i likes yale
go bulldogs</p>
<p>I am a parent of one D at H and the other at Y. D1 is a cutthroat, competitive, type-A person, and is in heaven (she calls it “her element”) at H. D2 is a fun-loving, cooperative competitor (I call her a “stealth competitor”), and she is as happy as a clam at Y (so far anyway: she is a Frosh). I know those tend to be the stereotypes of H and Y students, but so far for us it seems to hold true. Good luck with your decision, and congratulations!</p>
<p>I’m glad to hear that, EngProfMom. I’m not as familiar with the younger people, and Harvard’s older people are dazzling. It hurts, however, to consider Harvard’s English department on a par with Yale’s; in the good old days (mine, at least), Harvard wasn’t even in the running. So I am happy to go back to thinking that Yale is the best place for lit.</p>
<p>(But, gosh, I really like Stephen Greenblatt, Helen Vendler, Henry Louis Gates, Dennis Donoghue, Marjorie Garber, Jorie Graham . . . And I can’t tell you how said I was to learn of Barbara Johnson’s illness and death. One of my favorite TAs ever.)</p>
<p>
That’s hard to answer. I guess it depends on how much you like football. Football takes up so much time that the other members of the team are your primary peers, and I think you miss out on some of the other elements of campus life. The new coach has tried to change that by having early morning practices instead of afternoon practice, so the students can be more involved. But I think this is probably an issue at every college for sports that take up a huge amount of time.</p>
<p>
This also describes my son to a T (his friends in high school called him a “closet genius”). He’s having a great time as a freshman at Yale, too.</p>
<p>^^Good description of my son, too. You hit it on the head, Bay.</p>
<p>Re football: My son is in a very compatible suite of eight guys, two of them recruited athletes. One is on the football team, and the other plays a sport with a lower profile. Son says that they seldom see the football player because his sport takes up so much of his time. The other athlete is an integral part of their cozy group.</p>
<p>The kids I know at Yale now, or recently (a couple just graduated), were not anyone’s idea of “stealth competitors”. They were not at all cutthroat, but no one ever accused them of hiding their light under a bushel. </p>
<p>As for football players, my college had a lot of them, including two future bona fide NFL stars, and they had pretty normal lives in the off-season. I saw one (not an NFLer) this summer at a non-Yale event. He was never a close friend at all, but it’s clear that we both went to the same college.</p>
<p>You’ve named some of Harvard’s impressive “stars” in the English faculty, JHS, although I do note, when I look at Harvard’s English Dept. website, all of their office hours are listed “by appt” or “on leave.” The question of how to compare the relative strengths and Yale’s and Harvard’s English Depts would be a complex one, of course, but Yale’s clear and current evidence of an ongoing plan for hiring new faculty would be crucial in any evaluation of Yale’s strengths, in addition to the evidence of granting tenure to scholars who work in both “core” areas as well as at the “edges” of a discipline and thus create new areas and link with other areas. </p>
<p>Evident strengths in Yale’s English Dept. are American Studies (long an area of strength for Yale), where Michael Warner (brilliant in queer theory) and Wai-Chee Dimock are both outstanding in influencing how younger scholars are now redefining the field. While it’s true that Harvard has Jorie Graham, Yale’s J.D. McClatchey (also editor of the famed Yale Review, which publishes lots of young poets) is excellent. While Harvard does have Henry Louis Gates, Yale is taking a really “edgy” approach to African American Studies with the brilliant writer Caryl Phillips. </p>
<p>It’s really interesting to see that Yale is apparently doing searches for “emerging” areas such as Asian American Lit, and that with the terrific hire of Alastair Minnis in medieval, Yale appears to be building a strong program there, too. Both Medieval Studies and 18th century studies are really interesting fields within an English Dept. because that’s where you often find people doing deeply interdisciplinary work, extending out to Comp Lit, to other languages. Of course no English professor is going to dismiss Shakespeare, and an interesting thing about David Scott Kastan - another recent hire to Yale, from Columbia – is that he has a solid record training graduate students. </p>
<p>In sum, a quick look in comparing the two English Depts.: they’re about equal in 19th century Victorian, about equal MAYBE in creative writing (although Yale’s School of Drama adds considerably there, and Yale has a number of really good practicing critics), Harvard’s Greenblatt AND Barbara Lewalski get the edge for Shakespeare/Renaissance, but Yale is way ahead in American and Comparative/Ethnic Studies. </p>
<p>Were I to compare their strengths in literary and cultural theory – a field where Yale was way, way ahead of Harvard, which has never caught up – I’d argue that the “historicist” approach that Harvard’s Greenblatt represents is more than matched by Yale’s evident strengths in postcolonial, conceived in a broad way, through many excellent people trained and working in Comparative Literature, such as Pericles Lewis, Katie Trumpener, etc.</p>
<p>I think it would be worth going to Yale just to study with somebody name Pericles Lewis.</p>
<p>In my extended group of buddies there were 3 rowers, 4 footballers and one hockey guy and one B-baller. During any particular season, you’d see the guys occasionally and usually late at night because they had to be so disciplined with their time juggling practice and other ECs and school work. However, I can honestly say we all had lots of bonding time and we all considered each other dear and even intimate friends. I’d say it was a direct result of the Residential College system which forced the happy coincidence of diverse guys and gals together to form deep and lasting friendships. </p>
<p>I don’t have any first hand info but it would seem the House system can’t deliver this as well. I knew a girl who was a swimmer at Stanford and she really felt she missed out on a lot because her circle was mostly only other swimmers. She couldn’t comprehend how I knew so many people that were traditionally in “tight” circles.</p>
<p>Regardless, best of luck to you. If you choose H, please don’t bemoan us if we “boo” at you. It’s out of love anyways!</p>