[轉貼]Interesting Article Regarding Harvard

[william]

This was in Friday's Wall St. Journal, enjoy!

"A Flood of Crimson Ink"
By Michael Steinberger
Friday, April 29th.

Another academic year is drawing to a close, another year in which Harvard has generated vastly more headlines than any other American university. Most of these, of late, have concerned Lawrence Summers, Harvard's president, who famously suggested that there may be a biological explanation for the paucity of female scholars in the hard sciences. (He hasn't stopped apologizing since). But a single controversy doesn't account for all the interest. Two recent books are decidedly unflattering to the school: Richard Bradley's "Harvard Rules" is, among other things, an assault on the entire three years of Mr. Summers's tenure, charging him with arrogance and bad manners, among much else. And in "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class," Ross Douthat, class of 2002, describes his own Harvard education as a combination of vacuous classroom assignments, cruel social climbing and feverish networking.

Of course, a fervid interest in Harvard is nothing out of the ordinary: It is the country's most famous university, with a long claim on distinguished scholarship, political influence and high SAT scores. Most important, the media have long fawned over Harvard, treating its "brand" as pure gold. But while the school may have merited obsessive coverage in the past, it no longer does: Harvard is diminishing in importance as a factory for ideas and a breeding ground for future leaders. In all sorts of ways it is not nearly as pivotal to the life of the nation as it once was. You just wouldn't know that by reading the papers or browsing the bookstands.

Take politics. Harvard has long prided itself on being an incubator of political talent, and for good reason: It has educated seven US presidents, more than any other graduate university. But only two Harvard graduates have been elected president in the last 45 years, and one of them, the current occupant of the Oval Office, holds a Harvard MBA. By contrast, four of the six most recent presidents earned degrees from Yale, and two Yalies squared off in the past election. Moreover, for Democratic office-seekers at least, a Harvard education, with its suggestion of Eastern privilege and liberal elitism, is probably more of a liability than an asset these days.

Harvard also matters less in the business world. It is true that a few Harvard graduates (and one dropout, Bill Gates) have figures prominently in the digital revolution - unquestionably the biggest story in the past decade - but Stanford is a much more prolific supplier of its brainpower. Google, Yahoo!, Cicsco, Sun Microsystems and a raft of other marquee tech firms were partly or wholly incubated on the Stanford campus.

Meanwhile, there are fewer Harvard diplomas hanging in corporate boardrooms. According to the executive search firm Stuart Spencer, the percentage of large-company CEOs holding Harvard MBAs declined to 23% last year from 28% in 1998. Of the Fortune 1000 CEO's appointed so far this year, just one, Corning Wendell Weeks, earned a Harvard MBA. Asked about Harvard's declining presence in the executive suites, Mr. Weeks jokingly told USA Toady, "I've yet to see a study that Harvard creates value."

Quite the opposite, actually. Two years ago, famed hedge-fund manager Victor Niederhoffer (himself a Harvard alumnus) and Laurel Kenner did a study measuring the performance of Nasdaq 100 companies run by Harvard graduates, of which there happened to be an unusually large number at the time. The results were not pretty. Mr. Niederhoffer and Ms. Kenner looked at the nine Nasdaq 100 firms headed by Harvard grads and found that they had, over a five-year period, dramatically underperformed Nasdaq firms run by graduates of the other Ivy League schools, Ivy League equivalents (Stanford, MIT, Berkeley) and state schools.

Harvard is also a much less important intellectual hub than it once was. The University of Chicago, for one, has wielded much more influence in recent decades. It is not an exaggeration to say that Chicago laid the intellectual foundation for the conservative ascendancy and nurtured the ideas that now drive the debate over economic policy, legal theory and foreign affairs. The key ideas of the so-called Reagan Revolution, including monetarism and deregulation, trace their origins back to the free-market theorizing of Chicago's economics department. (One striking measure of the department's clout: Of the 55 economists awarded the Nobel Prize since 1969, when economics was added to the roster, 10 have taught at Chicago and an additional 13 either trained at Chicago or have had previously taught there. Harvard, by contract, has had 4 faculty winners.)

One of those Chicago Nobel laureates, Ronald Coase, is acknowledged to be the godfather of law and economics, unquestionably the most influential branch of legal theory in the past quarter-century. (It applies economic reasoning to legal questions). And while Harvard certainly has its superstars, when you look at the people who have taught at Chicago in the past 40 years or so - Milton Friedman, Richard Posner, Allan Bloom, Leo Strauss, Robert Lucas, Albert Wohlstetter, Richard Epstein, Leon Cass, Saul Bellow, Martha Nussbaum - it is pretty clear which school has been giving off more heat.

So why does Harvard continue to get so much more press than Chicago or any other American university? One possible explanation: Harvard graduates are disproportionately represented in the upper echelons of American journalism. Harvard far surpasses any other university when it comes to cultivating journalistic talent, and all those Harvard-trained reporters and editors do an excellent job of keeping their alma mater in the news.

Young Mr. Douthat is a case in point. In a recent profile of him published in the New York Observer, he explained that he landed his current job with the Atlantic when David Bradley, the magazine's owner, walked into the offices of the Harvard Crimson looking for a few recruits. As for the book, it was commissioned by an editor who had graduated from Harvard several years ahead of Mr. Douthat. Nice connections, if you can get them.

The author attended Haverford College.

[davidlee0222]

so cool
know more about world #1
thanls for sharing

[william]

A response to the article


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While I think the article's point is valid ("Harvard's dominance is declining..."), the inference of Harvard's quality isn't ("... because Harvard is getting worse as an educational institution.").

At least in my view, it isn't that Harvard is getting worse (in fact it's probably still improving, progressing, etc.) but that other educational institutions have gained ground in the last 20 years that has nothing to do with Harvard, but more macro changes.

The biggest reason for this is likely how universities as a social institution has changed. Prior to the 1950s, the university was the domain of the wealthy. It was only after the 1950s when the middle class began to be more visible in universities, and only in the 1970s when the middle class dominated universities. Not everyone went to Harvard or other Ivy Leagues, but to other institutions as well. Enrollments during this period boomed and colleges began to open up to a point where it was expected that you go to university/college. Secondly, as technology became a more important aspect of the economy, a technical education (engineering, sciences, economics, etc.) becomes a more valued skill in the marketplace. This is not Harvard's traditional strength, and probably will never be. It's not a coincidence that the prestigious non-Ivies such as Stanford, MIT and Chicago really gained ground in the last 30 years just as technical innovation gains more prominence that used to be merely the domain of law and politics, which are the traditional strengths of the Ivies.

You see it with business schools. Prior to the 1980s, it was HBS then everyone else (and the MBA was not really seen in the same regard as it is now). Schools such as Wharton and Stanford really began to gain ground. When Wall Street was king in the 1980s, Wharton was the key beneficiary given its traditional strength in finance. From the late 1970s onwards, Stanford GSB gained real prominence right around the time as the rise of the personal computer and the gazillions of companies in the Silicon Valley that drew its talent from Xerox, HP, and Stanford. They were not just well managed schools, but were at the right place at the right time. Even to this day, there's the stereotype of Harvard as the preeminent "general management school", Wharton as the preeminent "finance school" and Stanford as the preeminent "entrepreneurship school" even if all three schools are more than that.

---------------------------------------
Alex Chu
alex@mbaapply.com
www.mbaapply.com

[william]

Here is another one ..........

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I think that all of these explanations have some merit to them, but as a Harvard College grad I can also attest that the education is not all that great. Harvard has been resting on its laurels to some extent, while other universities have been working hard to catch up. It's a bloated, self-satisfied institution where the entitled faculty calls the shots and isn't much interested in providing a high-quality undergraduate education. I can't speak for the quality of the graduate schools, since I didn't attend them, but my impression is that self-satisfaction and complacency permeate the entire university. I predict that it will continue to lose ground while the self-involved, PC faculty engages in internecine conflict with the incredibly abrasive president instead of focusing its energies on positioning the university for the future. Its best days are behind it. At some point, high schoolers will wise up and start looking more at Yale or Princeton or Stanford. Brand without substance only takes you so far.

[davidlee0222]

haha
sounds fair

[twkevin]

A response to the article


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

While I think the article's point is valid ("Harvard's dominance is declining..."), the inference of Harvard's quality isn't ("... because Harvard is getting worse as an educational institution.").

At least in my view, it isn't that Harvard is getting worse (in fact it's probably still improving, progressing, etc.) but that other educational institutions have gained ground in the last 20 years that has nothing to do with Harvard, but more macro changes.

The biggest reason for this is likely how universities as a social institution has changed. Prior to the 1950s, the university was the domain of the wealthy. It was only after the 1950s when the middle class began to be more visible in universities, and only in the 1970s when the middle class dominated universities. Not everyone went to Harvard or other Ivy Leagues, but to other institutions as well. Enrollments during this period boomed and colleges began to open up to a point where it was expected that you go to university/college. Secondly, as technology became a more important aspect of the economy, a technical education (engineering, sciences, economics, etc.) becomes a more valued skill in the marketplace. This is not Harvard's traditional strength, and probably will never be. It's not a coincidence that the prestigious non-Ivies such as Stanford, MIT and Chicago really gained ground in the last 30 years just as technical innovation gains more prominence that used to be merely the domain of law and politics, which are the traditional strengths of the Ivies.

You see it with business schools. Prior to the 1980s, it was HBS then everyone else (and the MBA was not really seen in the same regard as it is now). Schools such as Wharton and Stanford really began to gain ground. When Wall Street was king in the 1980s, Wharton was the key beneficiary given its traditional strength in finance. From the late 1970s onwards, Stanford GSB gained real prominence right around the time as the rise of the personal computer and the gazillions of companies in the Silicon Valley that drew its talent from Xerox, HP, and Stanford. They were not just well managed schools, but were at the right place at the right time. Even to this day, there's the stereotype of Harvard as the preeminent "general management school", Wharton as the preeminent "finance school" and Stanford as the preeminent "entrepreneurship school" even if all three schools are more than that.

---------------------------------------
Alex Chu
alex@mbaapply.com
www.mbaapply.com

TO 大衛兄

不曉得你有沒有看到 上面這 MBA admissions consulting 的小廣告
進去看了一下他的 pricing
而且他是Wharton MBA graduate
感覺應該滿有賺頭的
參考一下 他的營業項目
對你以後執業 可能會有幫助

[davidlee0222]

感恩ㄚ

靠腰..
他除了waitlist counseling以外我都做過了說
essay、推薦信、面試、履歷、career guidance、選課、選校
原來有這個行情...
shXt~
早知道就不要讓他們一頓飯把我打發了

還有extra服務項目
情感諮商、潛能開發跟激勵
真應該訂個價目表..><

[davidlee0222]

還外加專業項目服務
行銷、廣告、公關、IMC整合行銷傳播、管理
RC輕功教學

那位老兄每個項目收150美金ㄝ~
而且多申請學校還要加錢...

交交朋友啦~應該可以吃吃喝喝一頓~
哈哈哈~太不要臉了..
既然有專業拿來用用應該不過分啦~~^^

[twkevin]

感恩ㄚ

靠腰..
他除了waitlist counseling以外我都做過了說
essay、推薦信、面試、履歷、career guidance、選課、選校
原來有這個行情...
shXt~
早知道就不要讓他們一頓飯把我打發了

還有extra服務項目
情感諮商、潛能開發跟激勵
真應該訂個價目表..><

哈哈 大衛 那你可也別一頓飯想打發我喔

[davidlee0222]

沒問題!!
附飲料~哈哈

開玩笑拉~~
小弟已經到處騙吃騙喝一段時間了說
要是真能拿來賺錢
回饋一下絕對沒有問題!!
互相切磋囉~

[cseetoo2]

This was in Friday's Wall St. Journal, enjoy!

"A Flood of Crimson Ink"
By Michael Steinberger
Friday, April 29th.



[deleted]

Harvard is also a much less important intellectual hub than it once was. The University of Chicago, for one, has wielded much more influence in recent decades. It is not an exaggeration to say that Chicago laid the intellectual foundation for the conservative ascendancy and nurtured the ideas that now drive the debate over economic policy, legal theory and foreign affairs. The key ideas of the so-called Reagan Revolution, including monetarism and deregulation, trace their origins back to the free-market theorizing of Chicago's economics department. (One striking measure of the department's clout: Of the 55 economists awarded the Nobel Prize since 1969, when economics was added to the roster, 10 have taught at Chicago and an additional 13 either trained at Chicago or have had previously taught there. Harvard, by contract, has had 4 faculty winners.)

One of those Chicago Nobel laureates, Ronald Coase, is acknowledged to be the godfather of law and economics, unquestionably the most influential branch of legal theory in the past quarter-century. (It applies economic reasoning to legal questions). And while Harvard certainly has its superstars, when you look at the people who have taught at Chicago in the past 40 years or so - Milton Friedman, Richard Posner, Allan Bloom, Leo Strauss, Robert Lucas, Albert Wohlstetter, Richard Epstein, Leon Cass, Saul Bellow, Martha Nussbaum - it is pretty clear which school has been giving off more heat.

[deleted]

The author attended Haverford College.

這個講法是有點問題的
別的不說,
Richard Posner是哈佛法學院畢業的,
Martha Nussbaum 之前也是在哈佛法學院任教, 之後才跳槽來芝加哥大學
如果是像 Robert Lucas 這種一路上來都在芝加哥求學讀書作研究的也就算了,
他舉出這幾個例不正好反映出其實哈佛還是有它相當程度的重要性?

[william]

Dear Cseetoo2,

Thanks for visiting this board and sharing yr insights with us .... I have 0 knowledge of the legal industry

BR

William