Harvard, Princeton or Yale?

[Anonymous]

Both Princeton and Harvard had professors lecturing and grad students doing most of the sections (professors might do one). Each has undergrad seminars taught by professors. Princeton doesn't have law/med/business schools, but it does have grad students in arts and sciences and those are typically the TAs both at Harvard and Princeton. (Harvard had a few law student TAs but A&S PhD candidates were the norm.)

Harvard is a more grad-oriented institution and Princeton is more undergrad oriented (deliberately keeps the numbers of grad students relatively low). That said, both are major research institutions, so teaching typically isn't what most profs are there for. Their center of gravity tends to be their own scholarship (which is also the basis on which they are hired and promoted).

[Anonymous]

Due to its focus on undergrad education -- Princeton generally has much better undergrad profs than Harvard. Harvard utlizes people in some subject areas whose English is really wanting

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Due to its focus on undergrad education -- Princeton generally has much better undergrad profs than Harvard.

I went to both and strongly disagree.

[Anonymous]

Really pp? You went to Harvard and Princeton for undergrad? Mmmm.

[Anonymous]

No, I was a grad student at Princeton (and a TA there for four years, so I actually sat through lots of undergraduate lectures by different Princeton professors -- and, in fact, taught lots of Princeton undergraduates myself) after going to Harvard for college.

I emerged from the experience deeply grateful I'd been an undergrad at Harvard rather than at Princeton. I thought I got a very good graduate education at Princeton (Princeton's constraint on the number of grad students meant that the factory feel that some grad students complain about at Harvard was nowhere in evidence), so I'm not knocking the school. I was just underwhelmed by the undergraduate education (and ethos) at Princeton compared to what I had experienced at Harvard.

I wouldn't be eager to send my DC to Princeton unless it was a situation where her specific academic interests were such that Princeton had a much stronger program/department than other alternatives.

[Anonymous]

I'm curious (having gone to Princeton)...

What do you mean by "ethos?"

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Due to its focus on undergrad education -- Princeton generally has much better undergrad profs than Harvard.

I went to both and strongly disagree.

I went to Princeton undergrad and Harvard Law. Princeton certainly has better profs than Harvard.

[Anonymous]

The spirit or culture of the place. What was valued, what counted as an excuse, how people spent their time, how they saw themselves, etc.

Harvard was much more intellectual and there was a stronger work ethic. At Princeton, for example, I had smart undergrads who played dumb to fit in (and these were guys, LOL!). Freshman orientation included info on the top 10 signs of alcohol poisoning (and it seemed necessary, despite the fact that the legal drinking age was 21 at that point). You heard parties rather than typing when you walked across the quad late at night. Alumns were up in arms when the faculty pushed for more group 1 (highest SATs/GPAs) students -- at a point when less than 10% of the class came from that group. Princeton felt like a rich kids' school; Harvard felt like a smart, ambitious kids' school.

Beyond ethos, at a more strictly academic level, I think that the emphasis on undergrads lead to lowered standards. And, in some cases, a kind of lackey attitude on the part of certain faculty members (wow, look at the social status of the people whose kids I'm teaching! These are the future elite and I'm lucky to have their ear at this impressionable stage.)

[Anonymous]

When was that? Sounds like a different time or a page out of Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise".

[Anonymous]

mid to late-1980s. And, yeah, that was my reaction (e.g that I'd entered a time warp). I know some things have changed since (e.g. no more all-male eating clubs), but it was incredibly retrograde even at the time .

Some recent alumn pub referenced the fact that alcohol poisoning education was ongoing and one of the most sycophantic faculty members I had in mind was tenured/promoted despite really mediocre teaching and scholarship. So I'm skeptical that there's been a sea change, given the history of the place and the strong alumn presence. The Chosen was an interesting read on the differing institutional cultures of H/Y/P over the past century.

[Anonymous]

Ancient history pp.

[Anonymous]

I'm willing to believe that, but it'll take more than mere assertion or the facile generalizations/factually inaccurate comparisons (17:37, 18:15) I've read here thus far.

Re HLS vs. Princeton undergrad. Law school is a separate faculty -- with a few minor exceptions, those are not the people teaching undergrads. So that's an apples and oranges comparison. By contrast, both grad (i.e. PhD) and undergrad students do study with the same faculty.

I'm willing to believe that HLS professors are worse than Princeton professors, but it's no basis for comparing undergrad programs.

[Anonymous]

Apples and oranges to compare ancient history to the present pp.

[Anonymous]

Apparently not. After you made the ancient history claim, I did a little web surfing and found recent descriptions of Prospect Street that sound strikingly familiar to what I saw back in the day. Still a heavy-drinking school and the administration is still struggling (twenty years later) to transform the culture through the residential college system.

[Anonymous]

Princeton is one of the few elite universities in the country to have a woman head...so they've changed a lot. You seem to have a big axe to grind...perhaps you didn't get in as an undergrad.