"Is Harvard Overrated?"

Special Report in U.S. News & World Report,
Aug. 29, 2005

"Despite the school's well-documented academic prowess, there seems to be at least a shadow of a doubt. In a survey conducted in 2002, Harvard ranked fifth from the bottom of a group of 31 elite colleges when it came to overall student satisfaction. . . .Students still complained about the inaccessibility of faculty as well as the quality of instruction and advising."

"At smaller schools, you're going to have substantive academic conversations with professors who know your name. Here, you see a famous professor walk through the Yard, and it's almost mutual avoidance."

" 'Listen, the Core program is really disappointing. The lack of access to professors is incredible. Advising is abominable,' says Alicia Menendez, a women's studies major. "All that said, it's the students that make this place special.' "

THE NEW YORK TIMES, EDUCATION LIFE SECTION,
January 8, 2006

Title: "What Every Student Should Know"
Subtitle: "Even Harvard, as it replaces its well-known Core, isn't quite sure."

DUHH? Harvard Discovers a Real Core Curriculum

A new faculty report on revising the Core Curriculum at Harvard "essentially dismantles Harvard's well-known Core Curriculum, which requires the students to choose many courses from a fairly narrow menu demonstrating "ways of knowing"--say, moral reasoning and the study of foreign cultures. Instead, it favors a system of distribution requirements whereby students must take a certain number of courses in each of three general areas: arts and humanities, the social sciences and science and technology."

"This is a system, of course, that many other universities have been using for decades."

"It's old wine in new bottles. . . .It's not hard to imagine dozens of deans privately pulling their hair over Harvard turning up in the news for something that their universities did sooner and better. In 2003, for example, Yale issued a report, four years in the making, that winds up in more or less the same place as Harvard's but is far more eloquent and detailed."