<p>Of course I know what the National Medal of Science is. My point is that it is given to such a vanishingly small number of people that having 1 more winner over 5 years or 2 more winners over 10 years implies nothing about the overall quality of the faculty that numbers in thousands. The total output of the faculty is almost certainly hundreds of times more important than the work of a single National Medal Science winner. </p>
<p>Let me state it more precisely. What is dumb is not the Medal you are trying to turn into a surrogate for the quality of the faculty; what is dumb is your reasoning. It’s like concluding that because Miss Mexico won the Miss Universe title twice in the past 10 years and Miss Russia won it only once, Mexicans are better looking than the Russians. The same goes for the Nobel Prize. Such vanishingly few people get it, and there is clearly a great deal of chance/politics/element of randomness in the selection, having a few more winners over a couple of years means very little. The true pattern emerges only if you have a large enough sample size, which I would say would have to be several decades, not just 10 years. This is analogous to the situation with Rhodes scholars. Yale may have the largest number of scholars in some years, Stanford might in other years, but when you look at several decades, there is very little doubt which school is the most successful.</p>
<p>I have never argued that Harvard is better because it is the most prestigious. If you read my posts carefully, I have argued that Harvard is better because it has far more resources than any other school, including physical, intellectual and financial resources, has collected the greatest assembly of top scholars and students on earth, and its faculty and graduates have made far greater impact than any other school in many key aspects of our society; government, law, medicine, business, media, etc.etc. Indeed, Stanford has given us Google and Yahoo (the latter of which is scheduled to be soon swallowed up by Microsoft, incidentally, a company founded and run by Harvard graduates) and it has a great engineering program, although I’m not so sure it’s really all that much better than engineering programs at many state schools and tech schools. But in pretty much every other aspect of society I have listed above, Stanford is nowhere as visible as Harvard. And that’s why I must rank it in a tier below Harvard’s. Nuff said.</p>