Harvard: Overrated
For those of you who have a dog in this fight, yet another reason to feel validated in your contempt for the grade inflated prima donnas with a penchant for crimson and crow’s feet – Harvard grads.
<>Take politics. Harvard has long prided itself on being an incubator of political talent, and for good reason: It has educated seven U.S. presidents, more than any other university. But only two Harvard graduates have been elected president in the past 45 years, and one of them, the current occupant of the Oval Office, holds a Harvard MBA. By contrast, four of the six most recent presidents earned degrees from Yale, and two Yalies squared off in the past election. Moreover, for Democratic office-seekers at least, a Harvard education, with its suggestion of Eastern privilege and liberal elitism, is probably more a liability than an asset nowadays.
Harvard also matters less in the business world. It is true that a few Harvard graduates (and one dropout, Bill Gates) have figured prominently in the digital revolution--unquestionably the biggest business story in the past decade--but Stanford is a much more prolific supplier of its brainpower. Google, Yahoo!, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and a raft of other marquee tech firms were partly or wholly incubated on the Stanford campus.
Harvard is also a much less important intellectual hub than it once was. The University of Chicago, for one, has wielded much more influence in recent decades. It is no exaggeration to say that
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