Harvard Extension School

The oldest Ivy extension is at Penn...

Appropriately enough for the school founded by the inimitable American, Benjamin Franklin, the Ivy league's oldest extension program is Penn's.
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/CGS/graduate/

But online courses are quite limited - only one this fall. http://www.sas.upenn.edu/CGS/pennadvance/courses/

I have a friend from Honduras doing their Master of Envrionmental Studies. Other interesting specialties: Master of Science in Applied
_Geosciences; Master of Applied Positive
Psychology; Master of Urban Spatial
Analytics


But their most unique contribution to adult grad studies is the Master of Philosophy in Liberal Arts - a post-MLA degree that's short of the PhD.

"The MPhil in the Liberal Arts provides MLA graduates with an opportunity to continue their interdisciplinary study in greater depth. Students may take two different approaches to developing their MPhil programs: their work may further and develop their MLA research or explore a new intellectual project drawing from their prior coursework.

"Students are expected to complete five courses (no more than four in a single discipline), plus a sixth as an Independent Study in which they write the MPhil thesis.

"Students will select a committee of two Penn faculty who will help them to determine the guidelines of their thesis project as well as whether their project requires a defense. an examination or language proficiency. The Committee will also review and approve the written project as part of the successful completion of the MPhil degree."
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/CGS/graduate/mphil/

 

Have you forgotten what happened to Summers? There's no ying and yang but just yiang.

 

Harvard prestige

Harvard is the most prestigious school in the US. But why?

Is it because Harvard is more selective than anyone else?

Or is it because Harvard's academic offerings are better than anyone else's?

Well, there's no question about Harvard's selectivity. The statistics in, say, the US News rankings speak for themselves. It is very, very difficult to get admitted to Harvard College, Harvard Law, Harvard Medical, etc. (OK, Harvard Extension is an exception). Harvard is the clear number one when it comes to selectivity. No arguments are possible.

But what about Harvard's academic offerings? Is Harvard's undergraduate program clearly superior to those other schools? Well, now the answer is not so clear. Arguments are possible.

For example, check out "Harvard: is it the real deal?" in the latest US News. Since my personal bias is towards liberal arts colleges, I particularly liked the following quote:

Of course, Harvard has other strengths; no reasonable person would deny that a Harvard undergraduate education is first-rate. But other schools also have strengths, and also offer first-rate undergraduate educations. I would argue, for example, that MIT, Wellesley, Amherst, Smith or Williams (in Massachusetts alone) offer comparable first-rate educational quality.

So Harvard is unmatched when it comes to selectivity, but not when it comes to educational quality, at least at the undergraduate level. So it is reasonable to suggest Harvard's unmatched prestige is primarily due its unmatched selectivity.

 

Harvard's prestige is both image and reality....

Harvard's "presitge" is both image and reality - teasing out which is which is certainly a parlour game worthy of the ivory tower.

Image side? The NYTimes runs more column inches on Harvard than all other Ivy league schools put together.

Reality? It's old enough to have offered Galileo a post to teach natural philosophy, as physics was then known. (He declined.)

Image? Today, there are many many first-rate, mostly undervalued, educational opportunities elsewhere. Given the nation's continual demographic movement west and south, New England will increasingly be drained of elite educational capital, prestige, and means in at least relative terms. But in some ways, the past lives on, especially in fields less market driven - unlike IT for instance - think Stanford Research Park, Intel and HP - Silicon Valley has no Boston counterpart.

Reality? On the one hand, Harvard came to adopt the German style advanced higher ed system and its masters and doctorates only reluctantly after Johns Hopkins in Baltimore adopted it. On the other, in terms of adapting to the needs of business for training specialists, it pioneered the case-study method, barrowed from law school.

But the fact remains that Harvard (with Emerson, Thoreau, the Jamses, and many Adams's as alums) and Yale rank in the history of American education very roughly like Oxbridge does in England: if not at the center, seldom far from it. Only after WWII with the great growth of state supported education did this change. Before the war, 60% of higher ed was private - in the years afterward, 60% public. Even more the latter, now

For an example of how American education has changed, I recall an article (NYTimes?) not many years ago in which Yale Admission's complained about the stiff competition from the University of Michigan: much cheaper, in-state, and regarded as just as good there and elsewhere. Thus, Michigan had the highest out-of-state tuition of any publicly supported university. But - one could argue - this is only really a continuation of what Sinclair Lewis (a Yale alum) saw in the '20s in his novel Arrowsmith - the veneration of smug Midwestern provinciality. Yet hasn't cheap and fast transportation and the internet changed all that?

American education has become far more demotic, but the lure of connecting with past glory lives on. And for echos, traces, and tracks of our Puritan forebears and others since noted and famous, Harvard remains the ne plus ultra.

-Orson

 

OK... would you rather study an Engineering or Computer Science program at Harvard or MIT??

I would pick MIT because that is all they are about.

 

Re: Harvard's prestige is both image and reality....

Nitpick: I'm almost certain the first doctorate awarded in the U.S. was in the 19th century at Yale.

True, also shows up as a common theme in F. Scott Fitzgerald's work from the same era.

 

Re: Re: Harvard's prestige is both image and reality....

Little Fauss - you may have the advantage. I don't know about the very first doctorate! (Could it have been a one of?)

But as a system adopted by a US university, it's Hopkins first. Wikipedia puts it fulsomely in the plural:

"Johns Hopkins holds many 'firsts' in American education: it was the first university in the United States to put an emphasis on research, founded on the German university model. As such, it was the first American university to teach through seminars, instead of solely through lectures [a Harvard specialty]. The University was the first in America to offer an undergraduate major (as opposed to a purely liberal arts curriculum) and ***the first American university to grant doctoral degrees.***"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johns_Hopkins_University

It is also the first university to teach American history as the equal of Europe's - perhaps setting a precedent from which scholarship will never recover! (Think "...studies.")

As for Fitzgerald and Lewis' , I can only confess to sharing their St. Paul, Minnesota nativity - because I think I've outgrown their cultured (nee: indignant? righteous!?) disdain for provinciality.

-Orson

 

Re: Re: Harvard's prestige is both image and reality....

Well, I'm not sure just how picky you want to be but, as far as I know, the first Doctoral degree to be awarded in the USA was awarded by Harvard College in 1682 to Increase Mather (father of Cotton Mather). Oddly enough, Increase Mather was the President of Harvard at the time and the degree was Honorary. As I understand it, he was awarded this degree just prior to a large fundraising tour in hopes that it would lend something special to his efforts. The topic of Honorary doctoral degrees has come up more than a few times on this forum and so it seems to me to be especially interesting, and a bit ironic, that it should come up again in this historical context.
Jack

 

As near as I can tell, here is a possible way of reconciling our differences.

Orson pointed out the first regular PhD program. This was at Johns Hopkins.

I (Little Fauss) pointed out the first earned PhD awarded. This was at Yale.

Jack Tracey identified the first honorary doctorate awarded. This was at Harvard.

So, all of us could claim to be right, and each of the others could claim we're wrong. And we'd all be right--and wrong--simultaneously.

BTW: I read mine somewhere a few years back, can't recall the source. Possibly I'm confused.

 

Re: Re: Re: Harvard's prestige is both image and reality....

You lived in St. Paul? How long? I lived there for almost nine years--Como Park area, nice little brick Tudor, walking distance from the free zoo, the golf course, the lake. Used to walk to the evening concerts at the open air pavilion on the banks of Lake Como. Probably one of the nicest places I've every seen within a major metro (at least that's affordable). Then again, the way housing has gone there, I couldn't afford to move back.

I think Scott Fitzgerald ran away from the TC because Zelda couldn't stand it. There's something about the Minnesota mindset that's not too open to eccentricities--at least among Minneapolis and St. Paul society.

 

Re: Re: Re: Re: Harvard's prestige is both image and reality....

I was born there but spent my teen and many young adult years in Minneapolis. I have memories of Lake Como - I have a sister who lived on Lake Minnetonka, now in Lake Calhoun area. (It took awhile to get used to the West's aridity, by contrast.)

As for the "Minnesota mindset" - it is indeed conformist. It seems to be the Scandanavian element (to which I plead partly guilty to sharing).

During my last visit in November, for instance, I took in a Minnesota Orchestra concert. I couldn't help but notice the number of older boomer women's hair styles: grey, short - around the ears - in a ball. No imagination - no variation - scarrily identical. More like a uniform than a hairstyle!

Then, an article on local architecture in the Mpls Strib asked if the Twin Towns weren't becoming a mausoleum (sp?) of past styles? - yup. Can't get anything daring or new approved there; Frank Ghery go home! Scarry.

Meanwhile, at the University of Minnesota, they're already planning for contraction - not enough people and not enough students are already on the horizon. Sure, I run into enough former Dakotans and Iowans, visiting Colorado, who've made the move to the big Twin Cities; they're pleased and impressed. But having been to several bigger western cities over the last year, I couldn't help but see the torpor and exhaustion evident in this wealthy Metropole by comparison. Vegas? booming. Seattle? confident. Colorado? planning on the next 1 million new residents in 25 years.

It was quite as shock to realize that Minnesota is being left behind, slumping into a self-satisfied middle age of compromise and conformed "contentment." There's no visceral energy there, like the West.

So how come I blame the Scandanavian culture for its conformism? An old friend from Minnesota, now in Alabama, explained visiting Skein, Norway with his folks as a teenager. Skien is the home of Henrik Ibsen, the 19th century playwright, an exponent of modern realism, author of individualistic plays like "An Enemy of The People."

In Skien, Ibsen is remembered as a weirdo - an eccentric crank instead of a hero! And so it goes with Lewis and Fitzgerald's rebellion against home.

It's too bad.

-Orson

 

I wasn't talking about academic value so much as I was talking about prestige.

As I wrote in my last post, there are many universities out there are rather easy entry, attract lots of part-time students who are trying to work their classes around their jobs, and then suffer tremendous drop-out rates. That bumps them right down into the lower tiers in the prestige rankings.

That relative lack of prestige doesn't necessarily mean that they provide their students with poor educations. I think that some of the low prestige schools are very good and have plenty of academic value.

What bothers me is taking a program that would be low-prestige if it stood on its own merits, giving it an elite school's name, and then suggesting that the program and its graduates are somehow better than everyone else.

Maybe they really are an elite, but that case has to actually be argued. It can't just assumed on the basis of university rankings that are essentially irrelevant to extension programs.

 

Re: Re: Re: Harvard's prestige is both image and reality....

Actually, what happened was that Harvard wanted to get into the doctorate business, the faculty voted do doctor Mr. Mather, Mr. Mather doctored his faculty, and his faculty was authorized to doctor students.

 

The story of the six-page PhD dissertation in Classics at Yale (1861), to which you refer, was posted at the UMI website.

 

Having thought about this for all of one minute I have to admit that I'm skeptical about this factoid. If Increase Mather got the first Honorary Doctorate in 1682 is it reasonable to think that it took over 170 years before someone actually earned a PhD?
Assuming Ted is correct in saying that Harvard "wanted to get into the doctorate business," isn't it more reasonable to expect that the first earned doctorate would come some small number of years after the Mather honorary doctorate? Maybe somewhere around 1690 or even 1700? I don't know this to be true and frankly, I don't care enough to do the research but I can't imagine that it took another 170 years.
Jack

 

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Harvard's prestige is both image and reality....

Like the Coen brothers. They ran away, and have made careers of rebelling against convention. What was "Fargo" but one extended farce of Minnesota culture (or at least the rural end of it)?

I never quite understood the culture. Or perhaps I did on some level, but was too full of myself to conform to it. I've always vainly likened my self to a rebel (laughable pretense--I'm a garden-variety husband and daddy, I seldom do anything without careful, fearful contemplation), but in Minnesota, just by saying the occasional odd thing or back-handed compliment, I actually was one for the first time.

 

That rings a huge bell. Yes, that's what I was referring to. But I guess I don't know if that was actually the first awarded PhD in the U.S. Was it? (I don't know what the UMI website is).

And with a six page PhD dissertation in mind (leaving aside, for a moment, the fact that this 19th century student in question probably knew more about the Classics than the average modern university's department in Classics before he ever got to the dissertation stage), what's this prattle I often hear on this forum about the low low standards for online PhDs and the laughable dissertation rigor?

Hey folks: Yale PhD dissertation - six pages handwritten!

 

The Ph.D., awarded on the basis of an original dissertation, is a recent development. It started in nineteenth century Germany and spread to the United States, where the first Ph.D. was awarded by Yale in classics in 1861. The dissertation was hand written, six pages long and in Latin.

But doctorates themselves date back to the middle ages. In early medieval times 'doctor' was just a word for teacher, as was 'master'. When formal universities evolved during the high medieval period, existing doctors created criteria that had to be met for new teachers to join their ranks. So 'doctor' gradually became a degree, a title, and not just a job description. At first a doctorate only meant permission to teach at the university that granted it. But as time passed teaching qualifications became more fungible, so that a doctorate earned at one university (Paris for example) was recognized as a valid qualification by other universities as well, such as Oxford.

But for centuries these doctorates tended to be teaching degrees in professional subjects like medicine, divinity or laws. (In subsequent centuries the LL.D. and the D.D. were awarded so often as honorary degrees that earned degrees started taking different titles.) I'm not sure when the Ph.D. title first arose, but medieval doctorates in philosophy (whatever they were formally called, they might have been a subset of the theology doctorates) were really degrees in the subject of philosophy and they were awarded on the basis of examinations (sometimes just a formality), formal public disputations, and most importantly the recommendation of the existing faculty.

And these doctorates were teaching degrees after all. There were people out in the world practicing their professions without doctorates. There were bachelors in medicine or do-it-yourself vocational barber-surgeons without university educations at all. The same was true for legal advocates of various sorts. But these didn't teach in universities.

 

I think all that tells us is that despite using the newfangled German 'Ph.D.' format, Yale was still treating this degree in the manner that they were already familiar with. That means that they were most interested in the recommendation of their faculty, who presumably were already familiar with this candidate's grasp of the classics. The dissertation seems to have been treated as a formality.

I don't think that this historical curiosity reduces talk about dissertation standards to "prattle". It just suggests that dissertation expectations took some time to evolve and to stabilize in this country. They didn't pop into existence all at once.

 

Thanks for the history lesson. One thing that I'm still uncertain of however, is the distinction between the Honorary Doctorate given to Mather (for example) and one given to some other person who was going to teach at the College. If there was no dissertation, as in the German tradition, then aren't they both, more or less, Honorary?
Just curious.
Jack