It varies dramatically depending on type of class. For example, the first of the 4 Harvard classes that permits simultaneously enrollment without stipulation is CS 50 – Introduction to CS. This class has an enrollment of 1,600 in-class students and ~40,000 virtual students. According to HarvardX: CS50's Introduction to Computer Science | edX , 7 million students have enrolled in CS 50X on edX.
Intro to CS apparently works okay as a large lecture without a lot of direct back and forth from professor during the lecture. The more personal interaction occurs during sections, which I expect are led by grad students. I’m more familiar with Stanford’s intro CS class, which sounds like it uses a similar approach. CS 106A is one of Stanford’s ~2 largest courses, with similar enrollment to the 1,600 in-class students in Harvard’s class per year. However, sections are limited to a maximum enrollment of ~6 students per section as I recall, giving students an opportunity for more personal attentions and questions in what is often their first CS class. Sections get larger for other CS classes. It’s more important to attend section in person (CS 50 has some sections over Zoom) than it is the lecture.
Upper level humanities and social science classes tend to be much smaller and often involve discussing readings with professors, with direct interactions. These types of classes seem more critical to attend in person than the intro to CS example above.
In my opinion, much of class attendance stems from the professor. If the professor offers a class for which in-class attendance is important, then the class can be structured such that students are penalized in some way for not attending class. This doesn’t necessarily mean taking attendance, which often isn’t practical and can be a waste of everyone’s time. The professor can instead have in-class activities that are influential on the student’s grade, either directly or indirectly.
Sign-in sheets – that’s how my colleagues and I (not at Harvard! ) take attendance. Unless I have a very small seminar in which case I do it myself without calling out names. Takes 5 seconds. When students fail a class, we have to report the last date of attendance, so we need to do it, but it doesn’t take time. (Once again, we’re not Harvard.)
There are some large lecture courses, especially intro courses, that are fine even in recorded version. From my own experience, I got the most out of small group/seminar classes where class participation was expected. I also am a big fan of even large courses that were taught in the Socratic manner as I experienced in law school. What both had in common was active thinking with a requirement that you are able to understand different points being made (professor and students) and respond to them. Passively listening and even taking notes is not the same learning experience.
Back to the point of grade inflation - we have to note that this is not a one-way street. If expectations across the board are raised (eg. for graduate school and firm recruiting), then there is no difference if standards are raised across the board.
To give some examples: Law’ Schools’ GPA and LSAT medians have trended up over time, while companies have also raised their standards: anecdotally, firms like McKinsey or Goldman Sachs want to see a 3.9+ GPA, where 15 years ago a 3.7 GPA could be considered a great GPA.
This is also not unique to Harvard, or even to private schools. Cum Laude in the College of Arts and Sciences at UT-Austin was a 3.9!! And the page was removed, but earlier the McCombs school of business posted a GPA table showing that the median GPA in UT’s BBA cohort was a 3.73
Point being, if everyone’s standards are raised, including grad schools and companies, then there is no issue IMO. An A- these days is equivalent to a B 15 years ago, and getting a B is like getting a C from way back when.
The problem is that there is now grade compression at the top. If only 20% of students got A’s 15 years ago and now 60% get A’s, you have 40% more who are now equally competitive that would not have been 15 years ago. I am oversimplifying for one class, but you would have similar compression for cumulative GPA. One of the students interviewed even talked about how important college EC’s are now since everyone has similar high GPA’s. I don’t know if the importance of certain selective clubs (IB, VC, Consulting) is exaggerated, but it certainly favors kids with connections to upper classmen who are already “in”.
The importance of those clubs is definitely overblown, at least from the employers perspective.
Candidate A was in XYZ club, was “social chair” of the business fraternity (competitive entry), and now advises freshman who want to get into one of the business clubs.
Candidate B is part of the Investment club which has a 100K portfolio, and is part of the team which has realized a 12% gain in the last 9 months.
Candidate C has no clubs at all. She volunteers at a big non-profit hospital in the college city and helped the CFO speed up the monthly close from 7 days to 4 days. She has also been asked to work with the trustee who leads the Endowment committee, and is about to introduce a new and improved system for generating the 990 which will save weeks of time for the paid analysts on the payroll (plus give more accurate and speedy results to the Endowment committee members.)
How important are these clubs when a kid who is seriously interested in business can find relevant and high impact roles virtually anywhere with a little bit of shoe leather and initiative? I’ve interviewed kids who have taken Best Practices in supply chain management and introduced them to the local food pantry; kids who have launched a wildly successful marketing campaign to get parents of 3 and 4 year old’s to enroll their kids in high quality (and free) early childcare; kids who have worked with the sanitation department of their local city/town to increase participation in recycling programs; kids who have helped drive down solid food waste in their own college cafeterias by adopting “just in time” food delivery systems.
Kids endlessly obsess about “competitive” clubs where they can work on business simulation projects- when the world around them is filled with actual business problems!
Many go to Harvard because it’s Harvard. That’s really it. The name.
When I was in my mba, my Cornell undergrad roommate talked to his buddy at Wharton all the time. Rarely went to class. Did far less work than us. Yet companies were knocking down doors to get him.
Why ? He was at Wharton.
Of course you have kids at Harvard there to learn, participating a being the brilliant kids they are. But many will be like kids at every school - whatever they can get away with - they’re at Harvard, it’s all good.
If Harvard started failing kids, less would want to go.
That was kind of my gut reaction as a person who was involved in hiring. How would a bunch of upperclassman be able to select/mentor juniors when at most they had 1 summer internship worth of experience. My kid did not do any of these clubs but got an internship in consulting summer of sophomore year and IB summer of junior year. He did have fraternity brothers though who prepped him for interviews. Anxiety about selective clubs does seem real among at least a group of kids in college.
Agree that the anxiety is real. But it is self-generated and gets perpetuated in every competitive recruiting cycle.
You meet the students who create their own opportunities to show entrepreneurship, ownership, initiative, business skills/social consciousness, etc. and it is head and shoulders above the “we created a marketing plan for a fictitious startup and it won a pitch day competition”. I recently attended an on-campus pitch day– out of 12 contestants, there was one viable business plan (that’s not me talking- I was seated in the VC section). The other 11 had lunacy like “we will achieve 25% market share after two years” with an untested technology, a shaky value proposition, and a couple of logical holes in the strategy you could drive a truck through.
So I tell kids- find an actual problem to solve. Local aquarium is struggling to find ways to sell their “family plan” membership. Local botanical garden can’t retain experienced arborists and they don’t know why. Your college city’s annual “Run for Lymphoma” used to raise $30K but since Covid it now raises less than $10K- why? And how can you fix it? Your college spends $25K per year in hauling fees removing the used furniture, books, clothing, refrigerators that students leave on the sidewalk when they move out– figure out an environmentally friendly solution which gets these goods into the hands of people who need them (aka “Allston Christmas” in Boston).
You don’t need a club to demonstrate your business savvy!!!
All this was in fact an immediate thing at WashU too. When he started his first year, my S24 really had no idea what career path he might want to follow. And while he definitely did not want to be a business student, he thought it was possible some sort of business career might make sense.
And then he encounters these kids who are immediately talking about needing to be in the right clubs, or professional fraternities, and so on.
So he basically called us to ask if that was all true. Fortunately, my wife has done actual business hiring, and we both know plenty of people still doing it, and so we could confidently assure him that no, none of that was actually necessary. We did start the process of helping him network with people who could help him find interesting summer internships, but that of course is a very different thing.
Anyway, point being this anxiety is a real thing, but I also agree it is very much peer-generated. I truly have not heard any working adult I know who does business hiring talk about it the way these kids seems to be talking to each other.
Edit: Oh, and I do think it is sometimes parent-generated as well. Like not so much parents who actually work in business or finance, because again typically they know better. But maybe parents who want something like that for their kids without really having much direct experience themselves, and they are relying on things they have heard, potentially from other parents like them who also lack actual direct experience.