CAMBRIDGE,
Mass. — In academia, where brand reputation is everything, one university holds
an especially enviable place these days when it comes to attracting students and
money. To find it from this center of learning, turn west and go about 2,700
miles.
Riding a wave of interest in
technology, Stanford University has become America’s “it” school, by measures
that Harvard once dominated. Stanford has had the nation’s lowest undergraduate acceptance
rate for two years in a row; in five of the last six years, it
has topped the Princeton Review survey asking high school seniors to name their
“dream college”; and year in
and year out, it raises more money from
donors than any other university.
No one
calls Duke “the Stanford of the South,” or the University of Michigan “the
public Stanford,” at least not yet. But, for now at least, there is reason to
doubt the long-held wisdom that the consensus gold standard in American higher
education is Harvard, founded 378 years ago, which held its commencement on
Thursday.
“There’s no question that right
now, Stanford is seen as the place to be,” said Robert Franek, who oversees the
Princeton Review’s college guidebooks and student surveys. Of course, that is
more a measure of popularity than of quality, he said, and whether it will last
is anyone’s guess.
Professors, administrators and
students here insist that on the whole, they are not afraid that Harvard will be
knocked off its perch, in substance or reputation. But some concede, now that
you mention it, that in particularly contemporary measures, like excellence in
computer science, engineering and technology, Harvard could find much to emulate
in that place out in California.
“Harvard for a long time had sort
of an ambiguous relationship to applied science and engineering,” said Harry R.
Lewis, a computer science professor here and a former dean of Harvard College.
“It wasn’t considered the sort of thing gentlemen did.”
People in
academia tend to roll their eyes at the incessant effort to rank colleges and
universities, insisting that they pay little attention to the ratings that their
institutions spend so much time and energy chasing.
Stanford’s reputation is far more
than buzz, of course — it is a recognized leader in many disciplines besides the
applied sciences, and its sparkling facilities and entrepreneurial culture are
widely envied. But in particular, it basks in its image as the hub of Silicon
Valley, alma mater to a string of technology moguls and incubator of giants like
Google, Yahoo and Cisco.
In fact, while the university
declined to comment for this article, administrators and professors there have
voiced concerns that too much of its appeal is based on students’ hopes of
striking it rich in Silicon Valley.
Other colleges would love to have
such problems.
“There has been an explosion of
interest in engineering and related areas,” said Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s
provost. “We simply have had a hard time keeping up with that demand.”
At the same time, he said, Harvard
has a number of joint projects with its neighbor the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, and “it doesn’t make sense for us to duplicate a lot of what M.I.T.
does within Harvard.”
Undergraduates here are aware of
the contrasts with Stanford (and others), but they vary widely in how seriously
they take the topic.
“I’m a bio
major, and within that field at least, it’s not spoken about at all, whether or
not one school is superior to the other,” said Michelle Choi, who just finished
her second year. “I don’t think Harvard students at all feel threatened.”
But for
students more attuned to technology, “there’s a sense that they have a direct
pipeline to Silicon Valley and money that doesn’t exist here,” said Nicholas P.
Fandos , the managing editor of The Harvard Crimson, who just finished his
junior year.
Max Shayer, a senior from Alaska,
graduated on Thursday after studying engineering and plans to work for a big oil
company. But his younger brother has chosen Stanford over Harvard, and is likely
to study engineering.
Mr. Shayer said that he was
pleased with his own education, but that big industrial companies, like Boeing,
recruited more heavily at Stanford. “I would like to see Harvard build
relationships with these long-established industries,” he said.
And, noting the incremental and
inscrutable annual changes in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, others were
skeptical about putting any particular university at the top.
“It really depends on what you’re
looking to do,” said Patrick Galvin, a graduating Harvard senior from
California. “The top 10 schools are so incredible — they’re separated by very
little.”
Last year,
26 percent of Stanford’s undergraduate degrees were awarded in computer science
or engineering, about three times as many as at Harvard. At Stanford, about 90
percent of undergraduates take at least one computer programming class, compared
with about half at Harvard.
The disparity has deep cultural
roots at many liberal arts institutions: Anything that looked like practical
career preparation was seen as something less than real undergraduate education.
Stanford was never like that. In fact, it has become one of many universities
that worry about how far the pendulum has swung away from the
humanities.
Harvard administrators have worked
for years to expand offerings in computer science and engineering, but the going
has been slow. It is planning a new campus in the Allston
neighborhood of Boston, largely for those studies.
Harvard professors in a variety of
fields said that a little fear of a competitor was healthy, and that the
university was less complacent about its leadership than it once was.
“I think there’s a halo effect
that doesn’t do Harvard any good, because Harvard has, at times, had pockets of
mediocrity that it could get away with,” said Steven Pinker, a professor of
psychology and a noted author on that field and linguistics.
Harvard also has an image,
reinforced in college guides and student surveys, as a less-than-happy place for
undergraduates, while people swoon over the quality of life at most of its
peers. Its students have a reputation for being intensely competitive, working
hard and getting by with little hand-holding, at least by today’s standards.
Dr. Garber, the Harvard provost,
said that “reputation lags reality” — the university has, among other things,
recently beefed up undergraduate advising — and that people may not have a clear
view of their college experiences until years later.
Students
interviewed here said they considered the sink-or-swim image overblown. The norm
at Harvard, they said, is to tell everyone how hard you work and how intense the
place is. Students at Stanford say the prevailing ethos there is the opposite:
work hard, but in public appear utterly laid-back.
Jill Lepore, the noted historian
and Harvard professor, said there has always been a gap between perceptions of
Harvard and the reality, citing examples like Benjamin Franklin’s lampooning of
the school under the pseudonym Silence Dogood and the film
“The Social Network,” with its Stanford-like depiction of Facebook’s
origins.
“The Harvard in that film,” she
said “is utterly unfamiliar to me.”
The New York
Times
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