What could be better than Harvard?

[beyphy]

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@phantasmagoric

Second, Harvard does want to become a top engineering school - desperately. It’s been left in the dust by Stanford, which manages to be a top liberal arts school with a top engineering school. It’s left in the dust by its cross-town rival MIT. Heck, it’s left in the dust by tiny Princeton. And even its long-time rival Yale is well on its way to becoming a top engineering school…</p>

<p>If Harvard didn’t care about its relative place in engineering, it wouldn’t be about to launch a massive capital campaign largely dedicated to bolstering it. That science complex in Allston? Funny how similar in scope it is to Stanford’s soon-to-be-completed Science & Engineering Quad

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<p>Multiple things wrong with this. ;)</p>

<p>I think it’s hardly a coincidence that Harvard lacks a highly-reputed engineering program and that, just 2 miles down the road, one of the two bests institutes of technology in the world has one of the worlds best programs in engineering. Harvard students majoring in engineering can also take classes at MIT which aren’t offered at Harvard, which shouldn’t be too difficult to do given that, once again, they’re only two miles away from each other.</p>

<p>Secondly, while i think you’re right that Harvard currently wants to have one of the world’s best engineering programs, I think it’s pretty clear that it didn’t care as much about it in the past. You mention that Harvard is about to launch a massive campaign which is aimed at boosting the engineering program. What’s prevented Harvard from launching such a campaign in the past? Probably nothing more than lack of interest. This refutes your ‘Harvard wants to be the best at everything it does’ point, but I think this answer is much more plausible than Harvard lacking the, at least potential capital to fund such a department. While it’s humorous to imagine Harvard and its engineering department personified and, imaging it’s engineering department begging for more funding seeing Harvard, ashamed, pulling out two empty front pockets, it hardly seems plausible. While Stanford leads the world in university fundraising, Harvard isn’t much behind it. </p>

<p>Furthermore, the sources you cite talking about Harvard’s lack of resources for its engineering department seem like scare tactics designed to scare alumni in donating large swaths of cash so that the value of the Harvard name is not diluted. It’s probably meant to boost the aforementioned campaign you cited earlier.</p>

<p>As a final point, the reasons for Stanford’s, and Cal’s, top ranked engineering department is its proximity to Silicon Valley. Engineering is much more of a central part of Stanford than it is, and has been, a part of Harvard. This can be seen in its history, and also in the successes of its alumni.</p>

<p>I’d conjecture (this isn’t a point) that Harvard finally deciding to boost its engineering department has more to do with Yale boosting theirs than anything else. I think the Harvard-Yale rivalry is significantly stronger than the Harvard-Stanford rivalry, or any others. Harvard alumni probably hate being behind Yale in anything they do, so i wouldn’t be surprised if this was the spark that lead Harvard to finally decide to fund a world-class engineering department.</p>