Harvard College vs. Harvard Extension School : Part Deux

In a post over at Harvard Extended, Ian discusses the subject of “legacy” admissions.  In case you’re wondering, “legacies” are Harvard College admits who get in because of some special connection to the college that supersedes the traditional academic criteria that serves as an admissions filter.

It’s no secret that families who donate significant sums of money to the college can, in a sense, buy their child’s way into Harvard.  Although the term legacy implies a long familial line of Harvard alumni, my sense is that the program is mainly a way to reward alums who donate much and do so frequently.

Programs like these tend to weaken the assertion that only the best and brightest find a place at Harvard College.  As much as they like to believe that this is the case (and it is, in large part) the fact that there are students at the school that didn’t merit admission save the “Z-list” makes the whole idea of an elite cadre of undergrads just so much sophistry.

What is even more interesting is that someone who claims to be a graduate of the AA/ALB program is posting comments that denigrate the program that he graduated from:

HES is nothing in comparison to the college, obviously. HES is a diploma mill with very little/weak academic standards. What does work the FAS is the fact not many people actually finish their academic work and get a degree and of course HES is a cash-cow; I’d venture to say things would change if they were awarding 1000 plus “diplomas” err, oops, I meant “degrees” at HES.

First, I’m doubtful that this student is really a graduate of the ALB or AA programs.  If he or she is, then it’s likely that they didn’t see the life-change that they expected from completing the program.  I’ve often said that a degree from HES isn’t going to change your life; it’s mainly a way to acquire the tools to change it yourself.

Second, I’ve made a special effort to take classes that are Harvard-only classes.  These classes are offered to HES students via distance-ed and consist of the exact same material and exact same grading standards that the College and GSAS students experience.  I took GOVT E-1780 (International Political Economy) from Jeffry Frieden and asked him directly if the grading standards were different between the College and HES.  His one-word reply: “No.”

I completed several other courses at HES that followed this model.  The classes aren’t impossible but do require study.  You can’t just coast through and get a decent grade.  You have to complete your assignments and you have to keep up with the reading.

But it isn’t impossible by any stretch.

Which brings me to my final point: people seem to have the idea that Harvard College is a difficult school to attend.  I don’t think this is the case.  Harvard College graduates 97% of its students.  If the program were really as challenging as people think it is, I would expect that number to be a little lower.  MIT has a graduation rate of 89% and Caltech is 83%.  I doubt that anyone would argue that MIT or Caltech admit poor students.

If Harvard admits 3000 students every year in its freshman class, is the 3001st student unqualified?  What do you say to that student when they learn that they were excluded from the incoming class because of a “legacy” admit?

So what we are left with is an undergraduate program that (if you are lucky enough to find yourself admitted to) presents a 97% change of successfully completing.  This either speaks to the effectiveness of the admissions process or the lack of difficulty of the program.  I wont speculate on which is the case.

Like most schools, you can seek out the easier classes or the harder ones during the course of your program.  In the end, both types of students get the same degree.

I do note that my grades in the Harvard College only classes aren’t appreciably different from the grades that I received in the HES-only classes.  I’m only one example, but it is something to think about.  I don’t fear the College courses because I think they’ll be too difficult.  My fears are more likely to be centered around a professor or TF who doesn’t know how to respond to email in a timely fashion.

Are there more students in HES that can’t do the work?  Certainly.  You can’t have an open-enrollment program and not encounter the occasional toe-dipper who is trying to see if they can pass muster and get a Harvard degree.  The perceived value of the Harvard credential is going to draw these kinds of people.  Both the length and the rigor of the program tends to weed these people out of the degree programs by the time that they reach their second or third semester.  The easy courses quickly become less numerous as you progress.

I do believe that there are more examples of people like myself who lost their way on the path to a degree when they were young and are only now getting around to finishing it up.  Most of the students in my on-campus classes were bright and enthusiastic.  Many of them had similar stories to my own.

But I’m less inclined to believe that a Harvard College graduate is some mythical wünderkind and more inclined to think of them as a kind of fortunate opportunist.  I don’t mean that in the negative sense; I see them seeking a credential that will return far more in dividends than the effort required to obtain it.  That’s my point.  I don’t think the classes are so difficult that any decent student can’t succeed in them.

My experience at HES has been very positive.  It hasn’t been easy, and it’s not a diploma mill by any stretch of the imagination.  If you started from scratch and did nothing else but attend classes at HES, the program would take 8 semesters (4 years) to complete.  You would have written close to 14 papers of serious length and depth and attended over 1000 classroom hours.  You will have likely completed over 100 problem sets of varying difficulty and your GPA is likely to be somewhere shy of a 3.0.

The HES ALB program is a serious one and deserves the respect afforded to all serious academic programs.