Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Harvard Envy: Why Too Many Colleges Overshoot
    Harvard Envy: Why Too Many Colleges Overshoot
    Harvard Envy: Why Too Many Colleges Overshoot
    Ebook57 pages47 minutes

    Harvard Envy: Why Too Many Colleges Overshoot

    By Andrew S Rosen

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Harvard Envy is a chapter excerpt from Change.edu coming out October 18, 2011.

    Exploring the limitations of the exclusive, tradition-bound world of higher education, innovator Andrew S. Rosen, chairman and CEO of Kaplan, Inc., delivers a vision for making a world-class college experience available to students of all backgrounds.

     

    Little is known about John Harvard, who bequeathed his books and £779 to a fledgling college on the Charles River in the 1630s, but the institution that bears his name has become the gold standard for universities worldwide. Tracing this fascinating history, and the history of American higher education overall, “Harvard Envy” raises important questions about the effect of super-elite campuses on America’s educational landscape. Just as Congress hotly debated whether to approve land-grant colleges in the nineteenth century, opening the doors of higher education to farmers, we face a competitive new demand for a highly educated workforce. Yet many colleges continue to insist on limiting access, and many college applicants continue to believe that exclusive institutions deliver the highest quality. 

     

    With an eye-opening examination of the U.S. News and World Report college rankings and other barometers, “Harvard Envy” takes an enlightened look at how universities allocate resources and talent. Offering an inspiring alternative to the Ivory Tower playbook, Andrew S. Rosen presents a bold, cost-effective new vision for a truly competitive higher education system that serves both individual and national interests.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKaplan Test Prep
    Release dateJul 5, 2011
    ISBN9781607148821
    Harvard Envy: Why Too Many Colleges Overshoot

    Related to Harvard Envy

    Related ebooks

    Business For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      American Correspondence Schools in Context

      Jul 18, 2022

      In 2015 and 2016, Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute, two large for-profit schools providing online education, closed their doors. About the same time, others, including the University of Phoenix and DeVry Institute, experienced drastic

      24 min read

    • Article

      Confronting A Dark History

      Aug 5, 2021

      Confronting A Dark History
      4 min read

    • Article

      In Praise Of Meritocracy

      May 27, 2021

      In Praise Of Meritocracy
      7 min read

    • Article

      A Prince Among Men

      Nov 13, 2022

      A Prince Among Men
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Life Of Learning

      Sep 22, 2020

      The Life Of Learning
      5 min read

    • Article

      Famous For Being Indianapolis: How cities are like Kim Kardashian.

      Jan 12, 2017

      When Kim Kardashian was 4 years old, a University of California economist named Moshe Adler wrote a six-page paper explaining the means by which she would eventually attain worldwide renown. Published in the The American Economic Review, “Stardom and

      10 min read

    • Article

      Broken Eggs, No Omelette

      Apr 29, 2021

      I ALWAYS LIKED SHIRLEY WILLIAMS. She was a delightful person, and I know from a long-ago personal experience that she was a disinterestedly kind one as well. She was intelligent, rational, travelled and thoughtful. I am sorry she has now gone from us

      6 min read

    • Article

      Not One of Us

      Jan 21, 2020

      Not One of Us
      4 min read

    • Article

      Less Will Be Better

      Feb 29, 2024

      Less Will Be Better
      5 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Dec 2, 2019

      Letters
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Hyper-local Parent Power Winning The Culture War In The American South

      Apr 1, 2022

      RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, IS ALMOST AN English town. A settlement older than the United States itself, it is perhaps the perfectly preserved symbol of the deep roots and common ties of its country with the greater Anglosphere; to use the former Senator and

      8 min read

    • Article

      And All Because…

      Mar 11, 2021

      And All Because…
      6 min read

    • Article

      MICHAEL BARBER Revisits The Great Debate Between FR Leavis And CP Snow

      Nov 16, 2022

      Mention ‘culture wars’ today and people assume you're talking about ‘woke’ issues like race or sexuality. This was not the case 60 years ago when the messianic Cambridge don, FR Leavis, denounced the novelist and former physicist CP Snow, who in 1959

      3 min read

    • Article

      Expert’s Choice

      Sep 21, 2021

      The 1662 Act of Uniformity led to the expulsion of some 2,000 dissenting ministers from their living in the Church of England. It also led to a religious test at the universities that excluded dissenters. Many expelled ministers were university men;

      1 min read

    • Article

      Ingenious Thinkers Changed The World

      May 18, 2022

      Britain experienced a giant leap forward in the 1700s, a new era which saw breakthroughs in science become part of everyday life and work. In diverse fields and different industries, new and incredible inventions were making possible the formerly imp

      6 min read

    • Article

      On A Mission

      Nov 25, 2021

      In the first two decades of the 13th century, the monastic life was turned on its head by two reformers: Saint Dominic (died 1221) in France, and Saint Francis (died 1226) in Italy. Both men saw a scope for clergy who would live together like monks b

      2 min read

    • Article

      Michael Wood On…

      Jan 18, 2024

      Michael Wood On…
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Woman Who Gave Us the Science of Normal Life

      Mar 30, 2017

      Ellen Swallow Richards was not going to be intimidated by a room full of health experts and officials. Children were dying and their parents, Boston’s taxpayers, and city officials were to blame. The tiny, square-chinned woman thought nothing of clim

      14 min read

    • Article

      Campaigner. Iconoclast. Absent Friend. LGBTQ People Who Changed The World

      Feb 15, 2024

      NOMINATED BY GABRIELLE STOREY Christina, queen regnant of Sweden from 1632 until her abdication in 1654, was one of the most learned women of the 17th century. Her sexual identity and orientation have been the cause of much debate due to her cross dr

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Harvard Envy

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Harvard Envy - Andrew S Rosen

      Change.edu

      Rebooting for the New Talent Economy

      ANDREW S. ROSEN

      Contents

      Harvard Envy

      Notes

      Additional Resources

      About the Author

      Copyright

      Harvard Envy

      Why Too Many Colleges Overshoot

      Harvard.

      It’s the strongest and most celebrated brand name in higher education. Surely, then, it must have been named after an extraordinary man.

      Well, not necessarily. In fact, only the barest details of John Harvard’s life are known. He was born in a London suburb in 1607, the son of a butcher, who died when John was thirteen. He had a half-dozen brothers and sisters, but in 1625 the plague killed his entire family except for his mother and one brother.¹ From 1627 to 1635, John studied at Cambridge, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees.² Within weeks of his college graduation, his mother died, too.

      His family’s deaths played a vital role in this young man’s life. After his father died, John Harvard inherited £300 from his estate. His mother had quickly remarried a wealthy man, who died five months later, leaving her with sizable wealth. So upon her death in 1635, John inherited even more money—including a profitable saloon called the Queens Head Inn.³ In 1637, eager to flee the Old World that had brought so much sorrow, twenty-nine-year-old John Harvard and his new wife, Anne, sailed to New England. As cargo, they brought along John’s three-hundred-some-odd-volume library, which included Homer, Plutarch, and Bacon’s essays.⁴ Within months of landing, they bought land in Charlestown, Massachusetts. They began building a house, and John started preaching at a local church. But after just thirteen months in America, he died of consumption. He was thirty years old.

      Harvard’s life would have been sad and entirely anonymous but for one decision: he left one half of his estate, and his entire library, to a new college that was taking root across the Charles River in Cambridge. During his life, John Harvard had little to do with the formation of the college: its founders were laying plans for its creation months before he left England, and it’s unclear if he had even visited the nascent institution, though according to one sketchy account, he may have once had dinner there.⁵ And it’s unclear exactly what happened to the £779 he bequeathed the school. According to one historian, half of it was likely squandered or embezzled by the headmaster.⁶ John Harvard’s books provided only a passing benefit, too: a 1764 fire wiped out most of the Harvard library, and just a single volume from his original bequest survives today.⁷

      Nonetheless, the school’s founders decided to celebrate John Harvard’s modest largesse by naming their college after him. It was a surprising gesture—particularly since, unlike the founders of institutions such as Stanford or Cornell, Harvard’s namesake was uninvolved in its creation. In fact, when Harvard alumni decided to put up a memorial on the spot where John Harvard is buried, no one could figure out exactly where that was, since the death of the obscure minister had not been particularly noteworthy at the time. A student had to serve as a model for the statue of John Harvard (unveiled in 1884) that which now sits in Harvard Yard, as no images of John Harvard exist.

      No one who knew John Harvard could possibly have predicted his lasting fame. And just as surely, no one involved in the early days of the tiny Massachusetts college to which his name is attached could have conceived the outsize importance that Harvard University would have on American higher education. It is a truly remarkable institution. There’s hardly any parent who wouldn’t be thrilled at the prospect of having a child attend and graduate from Harvard, nor hardly a professor or college administrator who wouldn’t love to be able to say that he or she was employed there. And while this idealization may be natural and deserved, the near-universal veneration of

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1