<p>I’m a recent high school graduate in the very fortunate position of being accepted to both Harvard and Dartmouth. I have unfortunately found selecting a college to be a tumultuous process, requiring a great deal of introspection and soul-searching. I initially committed to Dartmouth but have had a lot of second thoughts. My Harvard admissions officer has been so kind as to allow me a little time to think about my decision. Can anyone provide insight and tell me if you think turning down Harvard is a mistake in the long run? Can any Harvard students/alumni describe their undergrad years?</p>
<p>Is financial aid a consideration? For our family, the decision was a no-brainer. Harvard’s financial aid award was much more generous than Dartmouth’s (almost 2X as much). Although Dartmouth agreed to match Harvard’s aid for the first year, they would not give us a side-letter stating that we would get the same percentage of aid for sophomore through senior year. So, for us – it was Harvard all the way.</p>
<p>I like the community at Dartmouth. When I visited each campus, I found Dartmouth much warmer and friendlier than Harvard. I like that Dartmouth is virtually all undergrads, and that almost all classes are taught by professors. In essence, I feel like Dartmouth cares more about its undergrads and consequently could provide a happier and more engaging undergrad experience. Granted, Harvard is Harvard, and there’s no doubt that the caliber of the student body, guest speakers, and university resources are superior to those at Dartmouth. My impressions could be off-base, and that’s what I’m worried about.</p>
<p>I would major in Social Studies at Harvard, which (imo) is more suitable for me than Dartmouth’s Government/Public Policy major/minor combo.</p>
<p>Dartmouth is definitely more of a touchy-feely school, while Harvard is a “If you need something, a resource, or a friend, it’s here – but YOU have to seek it out first” kind of place. </p>
<p>At any school, you will spend about half your time in class; the other half of the time you are free to spend doing whatever you please. If you follow your gut, then you cannot be wrong, wherever you go!</p>
<p>Dartmouth and Harvard really do have different feels, and radically different settings. Dartmouth is really the biggest, shiniest rural liberal arts college. It has Nature. It has Fun. It has Frats. It isn’t surprising at all that someone would feel more comfortable at Dartmouth than at Harvard, even if other, equally intelligent people preferred Harvard. </p>
<p>Harvard is certainly a better brand name than Dartmouth, but among People That Matter Dartmouth has oodles of respect, and will work just fine as a certification of how great you are just to have been allowed to go there. </p>
<p>Dartmouth has an awesome track record of alumni success. I would venture to guess that Dartmouth grads are measurably happier than Harvard grads, and I KNOW they feel better about their alma mater. Dartmouth may not – does not – offer as many paths to success as Harvard does. But one student can’t take advantage of 100,000 opportunities; at best, you can pursue 4 or 5. So the difference between 100,000 opportunities and 70,000 opportunities means practically nothing at the individual level. Anyone who thinks Dartmouth students are deprived relative to Harvard students doesn’t know what he is talking about.</p>
<p>Now, all of that couldn’t make me, or either of my kids, choose Dartmouth over Harvard in a million years. But we are not you. I know a number of people over the years who made the choice you are making, and not one of them regrets it. The majority of people with this choice choose Harvard, but that doesn’t make it the right choice for you. You are the one who has to live your life, and if Dartmouth makes you feel happier, more comfortable, and more inspired than Harvard, you will learn more and have greater success at Dartmouth (and after Dartmouth) than you would if you went to Harvard.</p>
<p>One final word of caution: If you go to Dartmouth, get the most out of it. How the heck can you know that Harvard’s Social Studies concentration is “more suitable” for you than Government/Public Policy at Dartmouth? Wherever you go, one of the first orders of business is figuring out which majors and which teachers are great there. And follow them. Don’t stick yourself into a slot because one thing sounds better on paper to you than another. Either college will have tons of things that could interest and inspire you, but they won’t always have exactly the labels you expect in advance. Keep an open mind!</p>
<p>I have very fond memories of my undergrad years at Harvard. The friendships that I made at school have been enduring and have greatly enriched my life. For me, I’d have to say that college was less about the courses/professors/institution and more about my classmates/friends.</p>
<p>That being said, if I had applied to Dartmouth, been accepted, and chosen to matriculate there, I have no doubt that I would have gotten a great deal out of that experience as well.</p>
<p>Your college experience is what you make of it. I’d recommend choosing either of the two schools and never looking back. Both are great colleges. Each has its own personality. I can see the attraction to the location of the Dartmouth campus, but the Boston area has a great deal to offer as well.</p>
<p>My guess is that if you’ve spent a lot of time soul-searching and still haven’t reached a decision, you’re going to be very happy no matter which school you pick. </p>
<p>I’d like to reiterate JHS’s People That Matter point. Your average guy you meet in the grocery store will probably think you’re smarter if you say you go to Harvard. That’s about the only real advantage that brand name gives you. Your prospective employers will not really care. </p>
<p>The tradeoff you have to consider is that for some people Dartmouth is too quiet, and for some people Harvard is too noisy. I don’t mean physical sound but I mean that if you’re the kind of person who wants 1000 options, Harvard has them. But if you’re the kind of person who would be happy taking 500 options (note I am completely making these numbers up) but with a little more guidance and “hand-holding” to help you choose among them, Dartmouth would be better. I am dreadfully oversimplifying here and I’ll probably read this post tomorrow and regret it, but I hope you get the general comparison I’m making.</p>
<p>I have two daughters; one went to Harvard and the other went to Dartmouth. Based on their experiences I’d offer this:</p>
<p>Both girls love their schools and got great educations. You can’t go wrong with either one on that score.</p>
<p>Despite Harvard’s reputation for having remote professors who don’t care about undergrads, and Dartmouth’s reputation for having super undergrad-focused professors, I could find very little difference between the two. As far as I can tell, both have many smart, accessible teachers who are very keen to teach and help their undergrad students.</p>
<p>The big differences between the two schools IMO boil down to two things: 1. Rural vs. urban setting and 2. Social scenes that revolve around Frats vs. residence Houses.</p>
<p>If you prefer trees, camping, skiing, partying at frats, togetherness, and a small town feel, then Dartmouth is for you. If urban life and all that offers is more your style, Harvard is the place to be.</p>
<p>In any case it’s your decision. Good luck.</p>
<p>PS: Both have cold, snowy New England winters. But they are not the same. People in Boston think their winters are fiercely cold. But those folks are weather weenies compared to the hardy souls who brave the cold months in Hanover.</p>
<p>My son had to make the same decision, but it didn’t take him long to choose Harvard. He was really uncomfortable with the fact that the fraternities dominate Dartmouth’s social scene. Also, he wanted to have way too many choices for extracurricular activities, and that is what one finds at Harvard. He never felt that his professors were remote, and he got to work with grad students starting in his sophomore year. I don’t think he regretted his decision for 30 seconds. HOWEVER, Dartmouth is amazingly beautiful, and the opportunities for hiking and snow-related activities are boundless. Your education there would be top-notch. If you felt comfortable there, then you will most probably be happy. </p>
<p>Money wasn’t an issue for us because my son started school before Harvard’s radical change in its financial aid structure. However, after my son’s freshman year, we got gobs of money from Harvard, but would have gotten nothing from Dartmouth.</p>
<p>There are economic theories suggesting that the main benefit of a college education is the signal it sends to prospective employers about your ability, not the actual knowledge you learn at the school. Accordingly, Harvard is more valuable than Dartmouth, but maybe just slightly, compared to, say, Harvard vs a state school.</p>
<p>The “undergraduate focus” thing does cut both ways. I really like Harvard; there are other places I could have done very well, although Dartmouth is maybe not one of them. One of the reasons I’ve liked Harvard is the graduate student population, and the benefits I get from the attention paid to them. My real professors are attentive. I’d much rather have only professors than only graduate students, of course, but the graduate students are nice because they are a qualitatively different resource than the professors and it’s nice to have both.</p>
<p>Things I have liked about being at university, not college:
-Breadth of courses. My interests are not so much bread-and-butter staples of every college. I’ve loved the depth and randomness of the course catalogue, both for my concentration and electives. As a fundamentally impractical person, I think it’s great that I can open up the course catalog for next year and decide to take “Japanese Folk Religion” or an art history seminar entirely on St. Peter’s and the Vatican. Every college worth its salt will have some random and specific courses like that, but Harvard has so many more courses (which it is able to offer because it is a large university) that I am happy.
One thing I found helpful in choosing colleges was comparing courses both in my major and in English, which I used as a metric for electives in general. (I love but would never major in English.) Swarthmore, e.g., got crossed right the heck off my college list after that. Harvard had like two dozen English courses I would have loved to take in the catalogue for 2009-2010; Swarthmore had, I think, one. This is probably less true Dartmouth v Harvard than Swarthmore v Harvard, but if you haven’t checked out the course catalogues comparatively, you should.
-Opportunity to take graduate courses. Possibly I am a super nerd, but I’ve found some of them relevant.
-Getting two types of teaching in many courses. This is my main one. I like courses where I am graded by two people with two quite different perspectives on my work because of their different points in their careers, as often happens at Harvard. I feel like it’s easier to improve, then, than with only one kind of comments. (In writing, not, like, problem sets.)
-I like graduate students. One of my good friends is one, and (as the eldest sibling/cousin in my family and someone without a ton of older friends from before college) I feel like I’ve been learning both about graduate school as an option (not so appealing) and just general things from seeing how one might have to deal with life at 25. As the eldest eldest, that was just not something I saw much of in high schol or would have seen much of at a more undergrad-centric college.</p>
<p>One thing: if you come in expecting to do Social Studies, you really do need to be OK with lots of graduate students running around. Coming in to Women’s and Gender Studies, say, you will have a lot of attention from full professors. Social Studies is one of the largest concentrations, but it is not a department, so it runs perhaps oddly. You have, I think, 4 mandatory semesters of Social Studies tutorials, which cover a syllabus of great social thought and then move to your more specific interests. Those are taught exclusively by graduate students, and would be the core of your concentration. Social Studies students do have to work a little harder to find faculty advisers etc. because they do not have a dedicated department. Are you OK with all that? Could you switch to government? There is a strong undergrad focus within the Social Studies department, but it is largely from grad students and not from professors.</p>