Why Harvard? Because Yale Sucks.

If you happened to fly into Boston and were lucky enough to snag a window seat, you might have had a glimpse at Yale. Google Maps says the arts and crafts college to our south is just 133 miles away. Via plane, that’s a short 10 minutes. On a train, that’s a modest 90 minutes. By car, traffic could push the trip to a few hours. But on campus in New Haven, it is an interminably long four years.

While Harvard has some flaws—and we are rarely hesitant in pointing them out—choosing between the best university and the 1,270th best college in the world is not much of a choice. Sure, Yale has a social scene (whatever that means), gothic architecture, and persuasive recruitment videos (or not). But it also has New Haven, godlessness, and George W. Bush—not to mention the poopetrator.

Of course, we do not mean to disparage New Haven’s premier school of clowning. After all, as Liz Lemon once put it, Yale is the Harvard of central Connecticut. But comparing Harvard to Yale is like comparing Kobe Bryant to an IM baller.

We have Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a former president of The Crimson); they have William Howard Taft. We have Jeremy Lin; they have Chris Dudley (who?). We have The Harvard Crimson; they have the Yale Daily News. Do you use Facebook? As Al Gore (a Harvard graduate) once said of the Internet, we took the initiative in creating that.

It should be noted that getting into Yale is an achievement of which to be proud. An acceptance rate of 6.5 percent is startlingly selective. (Though not, of course, in comparison to 5.3 percent). And while Yale may have lost its ninth consecutive Harvard-Yale game this fall, it did succeed in winning one of the last 15.

Yale student née Harvard student Sam B. Clark ‘15 once said, “Some people criticize Yale for not being right across the river from a big city like Boston, but I would say, you know, Boston is three hours away—it’s almost like being there.” Clark is right. 133 miles isn’t that far.

So, Yalies, don’t be too dismayed: You were pretty close to getting into Harvard. Or, rather, you got into something pretty close to Harvard. Don’t worry, there’s always grad school.

And for those of you just admitted to this august institution, we can’t promise you it’ll be perfect. We can’t promise you that you won’t have good moments and bad, tears of joy and of sadness, times of success and of failure. But we can promise you it will happen with people who reserve their poops for the bathroom, with a faculty whose most popular course is given in the flesh, and at a university that bothered to come up with an original motto. Welcome to Harvard.