Harvard or Yale??

JHS
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 11:02:22 +0000

Hanna is both right and wrong on that. Yes, the student bodies are very, very similar – demographically and statistically they are probably identical. Yes, that means the character of both institutions is very similar, too, much more so than people pretend. But I think there are meaningful differences in institutional character, because there are meaningful differences in the demographically-indistinguishable students who apply to or decide to attend them.

First, although there is a large overlap in the two colleges’ applicant pools, it is not total, and the difference makes a difference. Remember, about 1/3 of Yale’s class comes from its EA acceptees, and many (maybe even most) of that group never applied to Harvard. And even in the RD pool, many people apply to one and not the other. Of the last five kids I know who went to Yale, only one even applied to Harvard, and Yale was her clear first choice. Of the last 9 kids I know who went to Harvard, only two DIDN’T apply to Yale. But out of 13 basically identical kids, only half applied to both colleges, and only a couple had their decisions made for them by only getting accepted at one when they might have gone to the other. The rest made an affirmative choice. And in that group, yes, the Harvard kids were somewhat more overtly competitive and prestige-oriented. Not all of them, and not all in the same ways. Or, put another way, out of that group of 13, I would only describe 5 as hypercompetitive and prestige-oriented, and four of them went to Harvard.

My tiny sample isn’t scientific at all, but I think it illustrates a real dynamic: Only a portion, nowhere near a majority, of the students at Harvard and Yale chose their college primarily because if its prestige. But the fraction of Harvard students who did that is meaningfully larger than the fraction of Yale students who did that, and it makes the atmosphere at Harvard a little more oppressive.

And, I should add, so what? If you have other good reasons to pick Harvard, the small difference there shouldn’t matter.