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Comment by jncfhnb | Hacker News Reader

I feel like you have to pick a lane between saying it is a world class institution and “it’s just a brand”.

A world class institution likely deserves to be a good brand

Some parts of Harvard are world class, while others are riding on brand recognition. I've been at Harvard and several other schools, and Harvard had the highest ratio of brand to substance and in many cases was strictly inferior to the good state schools.

I remember laughing (from the Reed College library) at a radio interview about attempts to reduce grade inflation in the Ivies, because a student was interviewed complaining, "We have to study so hard, some weekends I don't even go out!"

No one in my cohort had to study, we wanted to.

For the most part I found people didn’t come to Reed for the brand, you went for the academics (and weirdness) and it showed.

Not really.

If you take Albert Einstein and put him in University of Michigan or Harvard, he's still going to be Albert Einstein, and some rich kid from Hingham is still going to be just another rich kid from Hingham - not Albert Einstein.

On some objective level, Harvard is awesome. But it really doesn't matter that much.

Geniuses are going to be geniuses. And no matter how much resources you pour on some mediocre person, they're still going to be mediocre.

Where it does matter is that a person of equal skills from Harvard is going to get more/better jobs than the person from Michigan.

This is why I think it's fair to say it's "mostly a brand".

The value is not in the education you're getting. Harvard isn't going to make the same person meaningfully more skilled or educated than Michigan.

The value is in the rubber stamp, mainly.

> If you take Albert Einstein and put him in University of Michigan or Harvard, he's still going to be Albert Einstein, and some rich kid from Hingham is still going to be just another rich kid from Hingham - not Albert Einstein

That’s ridiculous. Surely it depends on when and where you send Albert Eisenstein. it doesn’t matter how smart you are if the facilities around are up to the task to fulfill it.

> Geniuses are going to be geniuses. And no matter how much resources you pour on some mediocre person, they're still going to be mediocre.

Genius are only as much geniuses as the information they can retain, understand , and synthesize. It doesn’t really matter how much of a genius a 12 year old could be if you never teach him or give him the means to learn what an atom is.

are we seriously going to act as if certain institutions don’t allow better flourishment than others ? I’m not saying Harvard is the holy grail here but come on.

It's pretty common to have the op's misconception. Thinking that the natural progression is forward rather than a delicate balance of a large number of choices where any one or small number of total wrong choices ends you up in centuries of no progress or backsliding is so common it's even the basis of popular religions like Marxism and Marxism's progeny. I wouldn't be too hard on the guy, he's a symptom of our partially stagnant and/or backsliding time.

100% except for one minor correction - Harvard is a brand for prestige. Wealth is just one factor. They will continue to admit student cohorts that will maximize that prestige. That will include wealthy alumni, athletes, smart kids, and minorities.

The impact of these schools on the education and social outcomes of disadvantaged groups in this country is miniscule. I'm speaking as someone who went to an Ivy. If the US really wants to change outcomes for minorities, it needs to start at childcare and K-12. If the Supreme Court REALLY wanted to change shit up, it would limit public school districts to state level funding sources only and give vouchers to everyone.

It's a hedge fund that operates a university for the tax advantages.

For maximum tax optimization I normally recommend a Foundation or a Religion.

Foundations aren't too great; although you can maybe give a couple administrative jobs to your relations, ultimately the bulk of money still has to go to nonprofits, and a foundation faces additional taxes and administrative fees that e.g. a donor advised fund doesn't.

Maybe you just haven't found the right country to house your foundation for tax purposes? Charitable foundations in Canada seem to be a pretty decent deal. You end up having to use 5% of the assets each year for charity but that can include an awful lot of management expense and the charitable giving doesn't have to be to other charities. You end up paying a lot less than you would have had you exposed yourself to more taxation owning the assets in your name, plus you avoid inheritance taxation while still being able to stream income to your offspring through cushy foundation jobs pretty much perpetually.

I very much doubt that. I’m guessing the vast majority of the endowment is restricted.

That is, even if it is invested for returns, the money and the returns on the money must be used for the intended purpose of the donor.

Which does describe one aspect of the lever. A group can have all sorts of hedges including a world class institution.

I don’t think you understood what was said. The university is not part of the hedge fund. It’s a hedge fund that manages the Harvard endowment.

I understood. I'm saying that large endowments no matter their mission has a group of people that control that endowment. A conservative endowment can be used to leverage other positions members of this group can hold.

Salaries and other compensation can be considered part of the overhead of managing the money and the institution.

Restricted funds are not limiting to generally spending on the school. Many of them are more specific, I assume

Sure, but that's why universities like to ask for unrestricted donations.

The big numbers rarely are though

There is no reason both can't be true at the same time. Education is quite disconnected from research. Being good at one does not automatically imply being good at the other, but we do treat it as such.

Harvard is obviously a world-class research institute, but it seems to be funded by the wealthy essentially treating it like a social networking experience, and knowing that the label "Harvard" opens a lot of doors due to the research reputation. The education given to the "poor" and the stringent selection criteria imposed on them primarily serves as set dressing.

I would lean more towards "just a brand" IMO; would love to hear from grads though on if the actual education itself has prepared them for life in ways few other schools could.

I imagine it's of some quality, if for no other reason than the brand attracts talent and the money buys everything the talent needs. That said, what even is educational talent? Is that where the incentives are aligned for the institution, to get the best teaching talent?

Could probably find it in Google but I think there was a study that show Harvard (and some other similar universities) do offer an advantage in that it's the only way many people from disadvantaged backgrounds can mingle with people with connections, opportunities, etc.,. There's no educational advantage necessarily, but the same students going to a state school for example aren't going to be exposed to the same level of access to upwards mobility. People that are born into families with that access however, experience no additional advantage since they were already essentially born with it.

Is everyone just gonna skip over the Networking aspect like it isn't The most valuable part of the whole deal?

As the saying goes: it's not What you know, it's Who you know.

This is a big part of it; someone I know didn't even apply to HBS and kind of regrets not trying because they didn't at the time realize the scope of that network.

She ended up at Kellogg so still got a strong network, but Harvard is kind of unbeatable.

Who would even be able to make such comments? You go to one uni or another.

FWIW I don't think the content changes much between institutions. Certainly I don't see what an Oxford grad learned that some other engineering student at say Imperial or MIT didn't do.

I studied in a university in Hong Kong. What I found interesting is that our universities are considered pretty good (decent ranking), but in reality we lack a lot of courses that are offered by other universities (e.g. theoretical computer science), what we mostly have are courses in hot topics such as AI and CV, and a lot of professors can only do research and are terrible in teaching...

So yeah, you can have much worse education...

Exactly what I ran into at Oxford. The more decorated the prof, the less interested in teaching.

In the end the core of a degree is not going to change a whole lot, of course options will be slightly titled towards demand. Everyone who studied engineering did a bunch of math courses and a bunch of physics courses, just like everybody anywhere.

Harvard ‘buys’ faculty, that’s how they have become a world class institution. They rarely tenure their assistant professors. Whenever some professor becomes a rock star in some a second tier school, or non-elite school, HYP/S just buys these faculty with fat salaries, chairs, generous lab funds. Definitely, this makes many prospective Ph.D students flock to HYP/S.

All the talk about affirmative action is about undergrad/law school/medical school/business schools. Not so much about m.s/ph.d admissions. Because this exclusiveness is perpetuated; otherwise, Harvard ceases being Harvard. What happens if MBB recruit many UC Davis undergraduates; what if Louisiana state university law graduates become Supreme Court justices/interns at elite govt institutions.

HYP/S, uber wealthy, and their elite servant class(media, admission committees, c-level execs) don’t want to lose their power by distributing power across many schools, states, geographical centers.

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