To Young Minds of Today, Harvard Is the Stanford of the East
Riding Technology Wave, Stanford Rises to Top of Some Measures
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In academia, where brand reputation is everything, one university holds an especially enviable place these days when it comes to attracting students and money. To find it from this center of learning, turn west and go about 2,700 miles.

Riding a wave of interest in technology, Stanford University has become America’s “it” school, by measures that Harvard once dominated. Stanford has had the nation’s lowest undergraduate acceptance rate for two years in a row; in five of the last six years, it has topped the Princeton Review survey asking high school seniors to name their “dream college”; and year in and year out, it raises more money from donors than any other university.

No one calls Duke “the Stanford of the South,” or the University of Michigan “the public Stanford,” at least not yet. But, for now at least, there is reason to doubt the long-held wisdom that the consensus gold standard in American higher education is Harvard, founded 378 years ago, which held its commencement on Thursday.

“There’s no question that right now, Stanford is seen as the place to be,” said Robert Franek, who oversees the Princeton Review’s college guidebooks and student surveys. Of course, that is more a measure of popularity than of quality, he said, and whether it will last is anyone’s guess.

Professors, administrators and students here insist that on the whole, they are not afraid that Harvard will be knocked off its perch, in substance or reputation. But some concede, now that you mention it, that in particularly contemporary measures, like excellence in computer science, engineering and technology, Harvard could find much to emulate in that place out in California.

“Harvard for a long time had sort of an ambiguous relationship to applied science and engineering,” said Harry R. Lewis, a computer science professor here and a former dean of Harvard College. “It wasn’t considered the sort of thing gentlemen did.”

People in academia tend to roll their eyes at the incessant effort to rank colleges and universities, insisting that they pay little attention to the ratings that their institutions spend so much time and energy chasing.

Stanford’s reputation is far more than buzz, of course — it is a recognized leader in many disciplines besides the applied sciences, and its sparkling facilities and entrepreneurial culture are widely envied. But in particular, it basks in its image as the hub of Silicon Valley, alma mater to a string of technology moguls and incubator of giants like Google, Yahoo and Cisco.

In fact, while the university declined to comment for this article, administrators and professors there have voiced concerns that too much of its appeal is based on students’ hopes of striking it rich in Silicon Valley.

Other colleges would love to have such problems.

“There has been an explosion of interest in engineering and related areas,” said Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s provost. “We simply have had a hard time keeping up with that demand.”

At the same time, he said, Harvard has a number of joint projects with its neighbor the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and “it doesn’t make sense for us to duplicate a lot of what M.I.T. does within Harvard.”

Undergraduates here are aware of the contrasts with Stanford (and others), but they vary widely in how seriously they take the topic.

“I’m a bio major, and within that field at least, it’s not spoken about at all, whether or not one school is superior to the other,” said Michelle Choi, who just finished her second year. “I don’t think Harvard students at all feel threatened.”

But for students more attuned to technology, “there’s a sense that they have a direct pipeline to Silicon Valley and money that doesn’t exist here,” said Nicholas P. Fandos, the managing editor of The Harvard Crimson, who just finished his junior year.

Max Shayer, a senior from Alaska, graduated on Thursday after studying engineering and plans to work for a big oil company. But his younger brother has chosen Stanford over Harvard, and is likely to study engineering.

Mr. Shayer said that he was pleased with his own education, but that big industrial companies, like Boeing, recruited more heavily at Stanford. “I would like to see Harvard build relationships with these long-established industries,” he said.

And, noting the incremental and inscrutable annual changes in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, others were skeptical about putting any particular university at the top.

“It really depends on what you’re looking to do,” said Patrick Galvin, a graduating Harvard senior from California. “The top 10 schools are so incredible — they’re separated by very little.”

Last year, 26 percent of Stanford’s undergraduate degrees were awarded in computer science or engineering, about three times as many as at Harvard. At Stanford, about 90 percent of undergraduates take at least one computer programming class, compared with about half at Harvard.

The disparity has deep cultural roots at many liberal arts institutions: Anything that looked like practical career preparation was seen as something less than real undergraduate education. Stanford was never like that. In fact, it has become one of many universities that worry about how far the pendulum has swung away from the humanities.

Harvard administrators have worked for years to expand offerings in computer science and engineering, but the going has been slow. It is planning a new campus in the Allston neighborhood of Boston, largely for those studies.

Harvard professors in a variety of fields said that a little fear of a competitor was healthy, and that the university was less complacent about its leadership than it once was.

“I think there’s a halo effect that doesn’t do Harvard any good, because Harvard has, at times, had pockets of mediocrity that it could get away with,” said Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology and a noted author on that field and linguistics.

Harvard also has an image, reinforced in college guides and student surveys, as a less-than-happy place for undergraduates, while people swoon over the quality of life at most of its peers. Its students have a reputation for being intensely competitive, working hard and getting by with little hand-holding, at least by today’s standards.

Dr. Garber, the Harvard provost, said that “reputation lags reality” — the university has, among other things, recently beefed up undergraduate advising — and that people may not have a clear view of their college experiences until years later.

Students interviewed here said they considered the sink-or-swim image overblown. The norm at Harvard, they said, is to tell everyone how hard you work and how intense the place is. Students at Stanford say the prevailing ethos there is the opposite: work hard, but in public appear utterly laid-back.

Jill Lepore, the noted historian and Harvard professor, said there has always been a gap between perceptions of Harvard and the reality, citing examples like Benjamin Franklin’s lampooning of the school under the pseudonym Silence Dogood and the film “The Social Network,” with its Stanford-like depiction of Facebook’s origins.

“The Harvard in that film,” she said “is utterly unfamiliar to me

美科技學府 史丹福當上「扛霸子」

紐約時報報導，拜科技蔚為主流趨勢之賜，史丹福大學已經取代哈佛大學，成為全美最頂尖的科技學府。該校大學部新生的錄取率連續2年排名全美最低；過去6年中有5年名列普林斯頓評論調查中，全美高中生心目中「夢想學府」的榜首。

還有，該校向捐款人籌得的資金，連續數年高於其他大學。

在品牌聲望就是一切的學術界，一所大學如果能夠吸引學生與金錢，必是他校欣羨的對象。想一探究竟，不妨從身為全美學術重鎮的麻州劍橋市哈佛大學向西前進大約4300公里。

至少目前已經有理由可以懷疑哈佛大學是美國高等教育標竿的說法。普林斯頓評論手冊發行計畫監督人法拉尼克表示：「無庸置疑，史丹福大學已成為美國學子心目中的頂尖名校。」不過他強調，這是受歡迎程度大於辦學品質的結果，而且無法確定能否持續。

哈佛大學教職員與學生表示，大致而言，他們不擔心哈佛大學的教學品質與聲望被他校迎頭趕上。然而部分人士承認，如以電腦科學、工程與科技等學術領域而言，加州部分學府或許具備許多值得哈佛大學效法的卓越特色。該校電腦科學教授路易士說：「長久以來，哈佛大學一直與應用科學、工程學保持模棱兩可的關係。一般認為，那不是紳士研究的領域。」

學術界人士傾向於不認同為大學排名的做法。他們說，這些排名並未考量到許多學府花費大量時間與精力所追求的學術成果。

史丹福大學當然不是浪得虛名。它是公認應用科學以外，許多學科研究的佼佼者，一流的教學設施與創業文化更是各方羨慕的焦點。

不過更重要的是，它被譽為矽谷的樞紐，曾經培育許多科技大亨，也是孕育谷歌、雅虎、思科等科技巨擘的搖籃。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/education/americas-it-school-look-west-harvard.html

2014-06-01．聯合報．AA3．教育．編譯陳世欽