

What does Harvard do right? - digisth
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/05/what-does-harvard-do-right.html

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msellout
I certainly agree there's a rich-get-richer phenomena, but I'm not sure
there's evidence that mid-size VCs are disappearing.

The generic phenomena is "preferential attachment", which creates a power-law
distribution (nearly indistinguishable from log-normal). It's common for
observers to believe there's two categories of size, either big or small. This
is the origin of "tipping point" theories. However, in a power-law or log-
normal, there is no discontinuity. Observers are distracted by the enormous
difference between the biggest and next-biggest that they don't notice the
same relationship continues all the way down to the smallest.

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littletimmy
It doesn't "do" anything right. It just happens to be the oldest university in
the US therefore very prestigious therefore being absurdly wealthy (like
Oxford/Cambridge in UK) therefore being able to recruit the best talent
thereforee being very prestigious.... and on goes the cycle.

In general, it is futile asking what extremely successful outliers "do" right.
Even if they wilfully did do something right (which they don't), it would not
be replicable.

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cbr

        It doesn't "do" anything right. It just happens to
        be the oldest university in the US therefore very
        prestigious
    

That can't be all of it, because other similarly old ones are nowhere near as
prestigious. For example the College of William and Mary is 1693 and St.
John’s College is 1696, which puts them older than Yale or Princeton, but far
fewer people have heard of them.

    
    
        In general, it is futile asking what extremely successful
        outliers "do" right ... it would not be replicable.
    

Hanson isn't trying to replicate their success (found a top-tier university),
he's trying to understand it.

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hatmatrix
Yes, it's interesting to hypothesise what the younger schools that do break
into the top rankings are doing right. E.g., Stanford, Caltech, Carnegie
Mellon in the U.S.. It seems to be a combination of heavy private investment,
recruitment of name brand faculty, and structuring of internal incentives to
be a competitive (grant-winning) institution.

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cpr
This is probably off-topic, but in my experience a generation ago at Harvard,
what they did right was have massive _space_.

Dozens of large buildings with libraries, nooks, sitting areas, auditoria with
unlocked pipe organs (at Radcliffe), etc.

So one could always find a private area to study, read, think, play, and
dream.

Silly, I know, but I think it's the ultimate educational luxury...

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therobot24
That is actually a major benefit. I went to a smaller commuter school for
undergrad where most people would almost never hang around on campus (rather
just drive home) yet there was almost no 'good' place to sit down and study
between classes. There were plenty of quiet areas, but most were either not
very comfortable, or didn't have enough outlets. By my senior year I had found
a small nook in one of the buildings that had a table, whiteboard, and outlet.
I eventually stopped going home immediately after classes because i got more
work done there than anywhere else.

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sloanesturz
This may be the case in VC, but I would argue that in higher education,
Harvard and its peers have better faculty than "worse" colleges. The better
professors attract the most and highest-qualified students.

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eemax
And what attracts top-notch faculty? Other top-notch faculty and an excellent
reputation. You end up with roughly the same positive feedback loop.

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mhartl
I sonetimes describe Y Combinator as the Harvard of startup accelerators, for
exactly the reasons mentioned the article.

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mhartl
Ack, fatfingers on my Nexus—I of course meant "sometimes".

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ddp
Harvard is one of the two or three most important institutions in training
future members of America's most powerful mafias. Was this a trick question?

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comrade1
Based on the name of the website I thought it might cover the recent news
about the reverse affirmative action toward Asians at Harvard. I find it
amusing that white are now also benefiting from affirmative action.

(I like affirmative action - to bring diversity)

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LLWM
That's hardly news. It's been happening for decades, and before that it was
the same story except with Jews instead.

