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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If their academic reputation is "withering," why wouldn't that be reflected in fewer applicants?[/quote]
Not the ones who mostly care about the name.[/quote]
How can the "name" carry any value when its academic reputation is purportedly withering?[/quote]

To be fair, Harvard does excel in their graduate programs. Medicine, Law, Business. A PhD in math or physics from Harvard is no small thing. The JFK School isn't what it used to be. Tufts, Hopkins, Princeton, probably even GW and several others would provide a more rigorous deep dive into public policy or international relations. But overall, Harvard maintains its academic reputation through its graduate programs, which do tend to accept the best and not the hooked.

But at the undergraduate level, Harvard has long been known to be a soft school. MIT students can cross-register at Harvard. And they do so when they need a GPA boost. I just looked it up. 72 percent of Harvard students graduate with a GPA above 3.7. That's ridiculous.

For undergrad, schools like Harvard and Yale - and increasingly Stanford - are not the meritocracies of the popular imagination. They are country clubs for the rich and privileged. Even the URM angle is misleading. Two thirds of black students at Harvard are either African or from the West Indies, or the children of immigrants from those regions. And you can bet the other third all come from private schools.

I think when talking about top undergraduate universities in America, you need to put Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford in a separate category. They are operating in a different world.  [/quote]

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