How did Harvard gain its reputation and prestige?

mancune
Thu, 05 Aug 2010 19:35:45 +0000

I think JHS gets it pretty much right – particularly the point about real estate.

Jerome Karabell’s book (The Chosen: The History of Admissions at H, Y and P, or something like that) is pretty fascinating, certainly exhaustively researched. Though Harvard has pretty much always been the 800 pound gorilla of American education, even its reputation has gone through cycles.

For instance, in the nineteenth century, Yale grew to be a larger institution than Harvard, and arguably, a more progressive one. Its curriculum reforms started earlier than Harvard’s, and many were ultimately copied by Harvard. Yale was the first to grow into a full-fledged university, awarding the first PhD in America, and the first PhD to an African American. The situation reversed starting around the turn of the 20th century under Eliot.

Karabell notes that in the first half of the 20th century, Yale was a more popular college, receiving more applications than Harvard generally. (In popular culture, maybe Yale’s powerhouse football status, and Rudy Vallee and Cole Porter boosterism helped it to dominate, like Harvard’s media position today.) Small but bustling New Haven’s lively theater scene and the attendant bars and speakeasies made it seem a little more attractive than still puritanical “banned in Boston” Boston. Harvard still had the tinge of being a New England brahmin preserve, while Yale was developing a more national pull.

Howard Greene, in his 1976 book “Scaling the Ivy Walls”, one of the first of the now flood of college counseling guides, provides an analysis of the prominence of Ivy grads. He combined lists of people in prestige positions (Fortune 500 ceos, congressmen and senators, Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners, etc. etc.) and looked at which colleges they came from. Relative to the size of the alumni network, Yale led the list, beating Harvard by a small margin, but then there was a big drop with, I think, Columbia coming in third. Princeton came in 6th or 7th. (I can’t find a web link to it, but I think I still have the book buried somewhere in storage). The data was from the early 70s so these were mostly graduates of the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. I bet the list would be a little different today.

The situation changed dramatically after WWII. Boston/Cambridge held their own, while deindustrializing New Haven went on a dramatic 35 year decline. Until Kingman Brewster became Yale’s prez in the late 60s, Yale was seen as a much more conservative and slow moving train than Harvard, often running to play catch-up with Harvard. Additionally, Yale developed financial problems in the 70s. In the late 1960s, the endowments of Yale and Harvard were almost identical (just shy of a billion), even though Harvard had become a much larger institution. Yale basically stayed in the stock market in the weak market years of the 70s, while Harvard did more diversifying. By 1980, Harvard had about $2billion while Yale had about $1.2. That ratio has not really changed much in the last 30 years.

Over most of the post WWII era, Yale lost the admissions edge against Harvard, and particularly the cross-admit battle. (At New Haven’s worst point in the early 90s, Yale for a short time fell to fifth place among the 8 ivies in selectivity as measured by % of students admitted, behind Harvard, Princeton, Brown and Columbia; though in terms of cross admit battles and SAT scores it probably never really lost its #2 spot).

Today Stanford is clearly the American university with momentum and Harvard’s true rival. In the sciences and humanities it is basically Harvard’s close peer, and superior in some disciplines; Its professional schools are Harvard’s close rivals; and its engineering prowess is so far ahead of Harvard’s that Harvard is not really a rival. For the past 5 years it has raised 50 to 75% more money annually from its similarly sized pool of alumni than Harvard has; it will almost certainly surpass Yale as the #2 endowment in the next few years and then tag after Harvard.

As Heraclitus of old said “Ta panta rhei” – “all is flux.”