Pacman10

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.

wjb

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.

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.

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.

Hunt

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.

wasslion

Harvard imo.

NarutoHunter

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU .

Seriously though, go to Harvard.
Boston > New Haven.

Feed

^ Haha, /b/tard at CC?
Don't believe it.

@OP - Have you talked to alumni from either school? Might want to consider doing that if you really are stressing about this choice.

JHS

Ho-hum. You could look at any of the hundreds of old threads that discuss this. But anyway . . .

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.

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.

Harvard advantages:

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)

Yale advantages:

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

Harvard disadvantages:

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

Yale disadvantages:

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

Hunt

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.

1down, 1 to go

hunt -- better or worse than typical?

EngProfMom

@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'

EngProfMom

Although of course I don't want to hijack this thread....

pigs_at_sea

i likes yale
go bulldogs

Bay

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!

JHS

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.

(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.)

Hunt

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.

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.