Harvard Doesn’t Matter

~ Laura

Photo by Emily Karakis on Unsplash

As someone who has written about schools and colleges for twenty years (or more if you include my academic stuff), I often feel obliged to add my two cents on the education topic du jour. For the past month, the punditry has been fixated on Harvard, college presidents, plagiarism, and all that — topics that I know a lot about. Where was my think-piece? 

I let the topic go by. Frankly, I struggled to care. I wrote one piece on antisemiticism on those elite campuses and sent out some tweets, but that’s all I could manage. Harvard only educates 7,000 students per year, so it is insane that this one school sucks up so much of the education intellectual energy. Outside of an elite group of writers and thinkers, who all attended Ivy League schools, people are talking about other stuff.

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Published by Laura

5 thoughts on “Harvard Doesn’t Matter”

  1. “Harvard Doesn’t Matter” Does too! enormous amounts of money and research activity happen there and in the rest of the Ivies. Also, huge numbers of high schoolers bust their asses trying to make a transcript which will make them interesting to the Ivies, and this means even when they don’t get in they have spent their high school years inventing ‘bicycles to Guatemala’ charities instead of horsing around. AND the seven thousand fortunates who float through those halls of ivy get their resumes read carefully and their calls returned for the rest of their lives.

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  2. I’m all for the “Harvard doesn’t matter” approach. Yes, it matters for a small, important segment of the population, but what goes on at other universities affects so many more people.

    The SAT analysis I’ve seen most recently focuses on the Ivy-plus schools, where standardized tests *may* predict performance better than GPAs. (That was what the most recent NYT article focused on.) But for other schools it’s unclear. The data people I trust at my state public said this is not the case here. I’m not a data person, so I don’t know for sure. But for the average student who comes here, diligence and a basic ability to read and write can take you a long way, and that’s what good high school grades often capture.

    af

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    1. I think the Harvard plagarism thing was mostly a billionaire who wanted to smack those whose support of Israel was insufficient for him and a bunch of racists who believe a black person in a responsible position is an offense against white people.

      I am a data person and I’ve been learning psychometric techniques, but not applying them toward things like standardized testing. I think those analysts make more money than I do.

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  3. I have very bad luck with diploma signatures. One of mine is signed by Graham Spanier and the other by Gordon Gee, who is currently just over an hour south of me dismantling a state university. As with the post, I don’t really worry much what happens at Harvard. I do worry about the state schools, especially the flagships.

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