<p>Which is harder to be admitted to, and which has a tougher curriculum?</p>
<p>I’m in the class of '10, applying to both of these schools, so I should know a bit about it.</p>
<p>Are we talking domestic app vs. domestic app? Or is one domestic and one international?</p>
<p>If it’s the latter, it’s harder to get into the school to which one applies internationally; whether that’s Harvard of Cambridge doesn’t matter.
If it’s domestic vs. domestic, Cambridge. Cambridge has the same high standards as Harvard, but it deals with a much smaller applicant pool. For one thing, the UK has a much smaller population than the USA. The other two reasons are government and school restrictions. In the UK, a student can only apply to 5 universities, max. And, an undergraduate student cannot apply to both Cambridge and Oxford. Sure, students can be cross-applying at other top schools, but this would be like if, in America, students could only apply to Harvard or Yale, not both.
On account of all of the above, Cambridge has a domestic acceptance rate of about 25%. Harvard’s, we know, has recently hovered around 10%. Thus, there’s much less randomness, where perfectly good applicants are rejected. It takes the same level, thereabout, of stats though, so it could be said that it is equally difficult. The application processes though, are very different. UK apps concentrate almost completely on academics, whereas in the US, schools want (or say they want) to know who applicants are. UK unis are only interested in ECs if they relate to one’s course (major, essentially). I guess in that sense, one might say it’s easier to be accepted into a UK school than a US school, as one could just have great stats and be able to write a compelling personal statement and be accepted into Cam, whereas one needs a personality at Harvard.</p>
<p>I think it would be quite hard to compare the curricula. For one thing, Cambridge is a collegiate school, so life is more dictated by the college to which one belongs than by one’s going to Cambridge. Different colleges perform at different levels on the final tests. They are ranked on the Tompkins table, and the famous colleges, Trinity and the like, are usually on top. So, perhaps the colleges that consistently fall into the lower part of the table are a bit below Harvard. I would be loath to say that the colleges consistently at the top are above Harvard though.
There’s another thing, which I probably should have mentioned before I attempted to compare the two unis’ academics, and that is the British system. In America, one goes to school and has a major, perhaps a double or triple major, and a minor. These subjects may be very different. In the UK, one does one’s course at a certain college. “I’m studying Veterinary Medicine at Cambridge,” one might say. And such a student would really be studying just that, and really not much else. So the schools are trying to teach different things.
Also, UK study is much more independent. One reads to learn. One reads a lot. A lot of getting a degree is self teaching and independent study, reading in a library somewhere. Very little of the process involves being in a classroom with a lecturer. That is, of course, very different from the US system and from what students experience at Harvard.
So I guess what I’m really saying here is that the curricula are, to some extent, too different to be compared.</p>