Why is Harvard the best?

Harvard is the best because it's Harvard.

Yes, that's the answer. Maybe it seems too circular to some readers. Here's an attempt at a longer answer. The prestige of a school is based on the success of its alumni. Harvard has the most successful alumni. Because of this, Harvard attracts the best students who after they graduate, combined with the prestige of their degree, get the best careers and become the most successful themselves. The cycle perpetuates itself.

Harvard alumni control the best career opportunities. If you want to work at the Queens DA's office, a lousy low paying job, you can go to St. John's law school. The ADA interviewing you probably went there hiself. "Wow, you also went to St. John's! Cool, you're hired." But if you want to work at an elite law firm like Cravath Swaine & Moore, then you need to go where the partners of Cravath went, and they went to Harvard.

Harvard has the largest endowment because it's alumni are richest so they have the most to give. Theoretically Harvard could use this mega-endowment to make Harvard even better than it already is, but Harvard chooses not to do that.

In fact, there has been talk in the blogosphere of a Harvard Paradox. According to the Coyote blogger, who attended Harvard Business School, Harvard treats its students like garbage. "I do not think it an exaggeration to say that had Harvard scoured every post office in the country for employees, it could not manage to provide worse customer service day-to-day."

I don't think this is a paradox at all, it's an expected result of a business with monopoly power. Everyone knows that monopolies treat its customers like garbage. Take your local electric company, for example. They know you can't buy electricity from anyone else. So you get treated like garbage.

Because Havard is is head and shoulders above all other schools, there is no substitute for Harvard. (As one of the characters in the movie Soul Man exclaimed, "Havard! There's no subsitute!") In this sense, Harvard has a monopoly. If you are at one of the shoulder schools, you can defect to another shoulder school, so they have to treat the customers better.

At Arizona State University's business school (now called the W.P. Carey School of Business), from a prestige perspective this school is in the stomach. But they sure did treat the students well! They signed us up for classes with a complete minimum of hassle, occasionally treated us to dinners at places like the Pinnacle Peak Patio and the Stonebridge Manor in Mesa. We didn't even have to shop for textbooks. At the beginning of each semester we'd just show up at a private bookstore near campus, give the person behind the counter our name, and they'd hand us a package of all the textbooks needed for the semester, free of charge.

So would I recommend anyone get an MBA from ASU? Hell no, not if you can get into Harvard or another elite school. An MBA from Harvard will get you an elite six figure job at an elite firm where one day you may make seven figures or even eight figures. An MBA from ASU gets you the same garbage job opportunities you had before getting the MBA. Better to get treated like garbage by Harvard for two years, and then after you graduate you make the big bucks and get to pass along the misery and treat the rest of the world like garbage.

Comments

[Patrix]

Interesting.

Coincidentally, there was a similar discussion on an Indian blog given the current controversy surrounding reservations for backward castes regards IITs as a choice for institution.

Brand image and alumni networking often are the key factors that are greatly underplayed before choosing your college.

[nobody]

Isn't this a market failure? Employers are saying we value the fact we have MBA from elite school. Nevermind that they may or may not actually be better than someone from ASU.

What this is saying, it is very very hard to evalute MBA or JDs. How do you know that a JD from Harvard is really going to be better than someone from St. Johns? You can't, unless you have the inside knowledge on both inviduals. This is the typical asymmetrical information problem. The employers are using the brand name as a proxy.

As already discussed in the law school post, there is little incentive for school to truly disclose the value of their degrees. If there was a study to suggest that Havard grads do not routinely over-peformed gradues from St. Johns, there would be an uproar.

But HS is right that the value of a MBA degree is not so much in the coursework itself, but the connections and relations make during that 2 years. It is a awful expensive way for people to get to know each others.

Smart consumers of labor (employers) can use this to their advantage. If they can find a way to better evalute candidates directly, they can hire better talent at less cost. Just like the Oakland As.

[William]

This theory implies that the Harvard Business School admissions office is the most powerful bureaucracy in the US. Do these employees ever get offered huge bribes? Do any have secret Swiss bank accounts?

[Emma]

It's all about I.Q. scores.
Was it in the Bell Curve, or was it Steve Sailer, who quipped that one's alma mater has become a proxy for i.q. score (since i.q. tests have been prohibited for use in hiring)... and a very, very expensive one at that!

An aside. My brother, who is very average in intelligence, got a job at the Hard Rock casino a few years ago as an electronics tech. He mentioned to me that he took this weird test that the administration said was so great, it had stood the test of time since like, 1968. I bet that was a good test! I would think they are able to get away with the i.q. test since they are indians, but am curious to know for sure why they are allowed to use them. Or maybe they're not!