Harvard or Yale??

Hanna
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 12:02:11 +0000

“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.”

I don’t see where you’ve offered any evidence of this. Yes, it’s true that few of the people picking Yale over Harvard are doing it because of prestige. But most of the people picking Yale aren’t doing it over Harvard – they’re doing it over Princeton, Penn, Columbia, etc., and prestige is playing a big role. And even the ones who ARE picking Yale over Harvard (having gotten into both) are clearly thinking a lot about prestige, because they surely got into other schools, too, but those schools didn’t make the final two.

This has been an irritant to me over the years…the idea that Yalies are just the kind of people who can put prestige to the side and are therefore deeper (or something) than people at Harvard. I mean, come on. Yale impresses the bejeezus out of everyone globally, just like Harvard. Perhaps this meme is a way for a small subset of Yalies to get all the prestige benefits of Harvard, and still get to congratulate themselves about how they are above worrying about prestige. (This is, in my data set, the reason that Yale is far more popular than Harvard for the top students at my self-consciously “progressive” private high school.)