Choose Harvard

If you received an acceptance letter from Harvard a month ago, congratulations! If you have offers from more than one school, even more congratulations! This is a privilege that the vast majority of high school graduates do not have. I have an important piece of advice for the most privileged among you—choose Harvard. It is the best school.

Harvard is the best school because the best students choose Harvard. Year after year, students who are accepted to Harvard and other schools pick Harvard over other schools in the majority of cases. When students are admitted to both Harvard and Yale, for example, 58 percent of students choose Harvard over Yale. The percentage is even more skewed in Harvard’s favor when compared with any other school.

Why does this statistic matter, you ask, since these top schools already have top students? This statistic is particularly relevant because Harvard and its main competitors admit top students. Students with more than one offer are doubly validated as top candidates, and are more likely to be the “cream of the crop” even among the talented accepted student pool. So even though the top schools generally admit equally talented students, the choice of the “cream of the crop” group decides that the right tails of talent at each school may be uneven. Since Harvard beats all other schools in vis-à-vis comparison, it should have the largest share of cream of the crop students.

You will find that you can greatly benefit from having more talented classmates. First, Harvard (together with the aforementioned schools) is a competitive place. The greater your competition, the higher your bar for comparison, and the harder you will strive for success. Despite the competition, you will find it more common to cooperate rather than compete with your classmates, because these classmates will be your debate partners, project teammates, and future co-founders. You will benefit not just from cooperation or competition, but also from mere interaction with people with different interests and talents. Your classmates’ innovations and ideas can inspire you to apply them to your own work, through a magical process called knowledge spillover. Remember, you applied to the top schools partly because they offer you exposure to motivated and talented classmates. Even among the top schools, there can be differences in talent and motivation, and these differences count.

Even if you do not believe you will benefit from having more talented classmates, you should still value their opinions greatly. First, comparison between schools is elusive. It is difficult for any single individual to claim expertise on all aspects of two schools, so there are no true experts in the field. On these elusive questions, wisdom of the crowd dictates that best answers tend to come from aggregation of many people’s judgments, rather than the opinion of a single individual. Second, you should expect those who are accepted by more than one schools to form a particularly wise crowd, as they have made good decisions thus far to get accepted by Harvard. Choosing a school mattered as much to them as it does to you, so they must have invested a lot of time comparing schools, as you are doing now. It would be unwise to ignore their preference for Harvard when you deliberate your choice.

My advice does not apply to you if you have some unconventional talent and ambition. If you want to be the next NBA starting point guard, you should probably pick University of Kentucky over Harvard. If you want to build the next billion-dollar startup, you should probably pick Stanford or UC Berkley over Harvard. Having excelled at these activities, you probably know a lot of people with the same talent and ambition, who faced or are facing the same college decision. In these cases, they are the “wise crowd” whom you should trust for their judgment.

If you don’t have such a wise crowd to rely on, don’t worry. Others have gathered the data and run the analysis. And they have delivered a verdict:

Choose Harvard.

Jonathan Z. Zhou ’14 is an applied mathematics concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.