I posted something stupid on this but I wanted to comment on your post here. I did not go to Harvard and so I do not want to appear jealous. I do not know if I'm smart enough to have performed well there, and I understand it has some distinguished faculty members.

That said, the biggest thing that Harvard has going for it is that it is one of the oldest colleges in the country. Clearly, it is doing a fine job educating students because it's an old institution. It would not have survived this long if it were doing a bad job. However, if you look at what the students have produced, I think many people might be surprised.

The only thing I really know anything about well enough to write about is writers. I read a lot of fiction. I understand that just because their writing program is not the best in the world does not mean it is a bad program.

Still, the only contemporary or close to contemporary writers of note I can think of who have gone to Harvard are Gish Jen and Harold Brodkey. I believe that Allan Bloom taught there for some time, but I do not think he attended the school. He's also a polarizing figure, and some intellectuals of note absolutely hated him and what he stood for.

Harvard does, apparently, produce a lot of television writers, but you could say the same thing about pretty much any top ranking school.

This is all very impressive. TV writers. But harvard should be producing "literary artists" when it was originally a school used to educate theologians. Just one teacher, John Gardener, an American writer most known for his short novel grendel and his essays on literary craft, taught both Raymond Carver and Toni Morrison (There is basically not a bigger giant in contemporary writing than Raymond Carver just because his short stories are taught in basically every single writing class a student can take. I took 6 writing classes at 3 different colleges, and I read raymond carver in five of them. As for toni morrison, she won a nobel prize. There is basically no bigger deal literary prize). That was just one teacher. This one teacher was able to make a big enough impact on his students and to enable the few talented ones in his years of teaching to acheive real greatness.

Now, if you go through Harvard's whole history, you will find a bunch of great academics and writers, I'm sure. But I just googled and found out that Harvard, in 2016, had 22,000 students. It is also one of the top 5 oldest colleges in the country. It was apparently established in 1636. Now, if you're telling me that harvard, the entire institution, produced a contemporary asian woman american writer of literary significance, but not exactly a nobel prize winner, and an obscure, extremely talented writer who some accused of being long winded and others said might have been talented writer but also, more important, a creator of a literary hoax--if you're telling me that this institution is the best school in the country when in the past 50 years as an institution it produced 2 significant writers, then there's a problem. In comparison, John Gardener, one guy, "produced" probably the two most important american writers of the past 50 years.

Now, I would have loved to go to harvard. I'm sure it would have been a confidence boost. But I seriously doubt that there's something magic about the school.