<p>headstart, let’s face it, to get to the point that it could attract that talent --and MIT did too in terms of shared resources and some reflected glory. Though I agree with you to a significant degree. The larger point is about presumptions that people have – and these clearly favor the Eastern schools.</p>
<p>Harvard has been around a hell of a lot longer than any of the others, and is widely viewed as pre-eminent. Cambridge for a long time has been viewed as more of a center. This clearly should be an advantage in terms of attracing talent and certainly is so in terms of attracting attention. This largely applies to the Ivy League as a whole, being seen as more of the critical mass of quality university education. </p>
<p>One example that doesn’t even involve academics and is about Yale, not the Cambridge couple: one of the Western universities (you can figure out which one) had a student-written newspaper sex advice column that had some local acclaim for a couple of years and was the first of its kind in the nation, according to all reports. But then Yale started one and NYT wrote about it as the first of its kind in the nation. </p>
<p>Of course, it happens within the Bay Area too; most people even there don’t know about UCSF, the fact that its consistently ranked more highly than Stanford med, that it was the birthplace of recombinant DNA biotech (through the technology development and founding of Genentech), spins out huge numbers of biotech and has won a few Nobels itself. Standalone med schools just don’t rate that much attention.</p>
<p>But I digress…I think it’s clear what I am talking about presumptions. None of these schools should be in the shadow of any other – look how many of the Berkeley/Stanford Nobels went to MIT/Harvard. All ships rise.</p>