Is Yale better than Harvard? (The last two football games would say so.) This past weekend, I visited one of my friends at Yale to compete in a club squash round-robin on Saturday. However, I also got to experience New Haven, talk to students, take a walk around campus, and go out at night. Before my trip down to New Haven, everything I had experienced about Yale centered around the 36 hours of mayhem last year in late November when Harvard’s football team, and many other students and community members, traveled to Yale for The Game.
The first thing I think Harvard could learn from Yale centers around freshman integration into the College. My freshman year was by far my least favorite at Harvard, largely because it felt completely disconnected from everyone and everything else. As a freshman at Harvard, if you do not join a plethora of clubs and spend all your waking hours reaching out to people, it is very hard to meet anyone outside of your grade. Students can meet each other in their building, or at Annenberg, but the focus is placed on how much you reach out to others. I think Yale facilitates a much smoother transition for their freshmen. At Yale, freshmen get placed into their “residential colleges”—equivalent to Harvard’s Houses. This allows students to meet a much larger group of people, exposes them to many more facets of the school, and helps them build a lasting community right as they step on campus. The benefits of this system cannot be overstated. Everyone I spoke to felt that their residential college played a significant role in helping them adjust.
Within their residential college, students are assigned a “big sibling,” or a student from the grade above who connects with them and helps them transition into college life, especially in the first few weeks. In my friend’s residential college, it is customary for freshmen to have dinner with their big siblings on “family night” each week on Sundays, where students can only eat in their own residential college, building a stronger community. In addition, they have tight-knit communities within their dorms, similar to entryways, along with groups of other freshman students that form a kind of “cohort” in their residential college. Yale seems to place a lot more effort into ensuring that students hit the ground running.
These residential colleges appear to be incredibly invested in their students. When I was visiting, my friend’s residential college, Trumbull, had rented out the entirety of the local Barcelona Wine Bar supplied with food and a completely open bar (to students over 21). They had a DJ and an open dance floor that was actually populated. The House events at Harvard do not even come close. While Yale’s campus functions a lot differently than Harvard’s and has a much larger off-campus emphasis, their system is far superior to what I think is one of the worst aspects of Harvard.
At Harvard, I often find that students within each House have no connections to one another, and the House does not invest in the students or student events. My house, Cabot, has yet to host an event anywhere outside of the dining hall, the Quad Lawn, or the faculty dean’s living room. Many people I know have zero interest in their housing community and know one or two blocking groups outside of their own. At Yale, the residential college is well-connected, even with many students living off campus.
Additionally, the off-campus emphasis creates many more social opportunities for students. Many residential colleges consist of members who are all in social clubs that have parties and social events very regularly. On Friday, I went to a friend’s birthday party in a large courtyard, before hopping between club socials and frat parties. It is common for random social groups or teams to host parties on any given weekend. People often throw parties in their buildings or backyards, and there is a fairly active frat scene. When it comes to the variety and quality of nightlife, Yale seemed to have the edge once again.
When I went out, I didn’t have many chances to talk to students, as it was often loud and I was not focused on writing this article at the time. However, in conversations outside of parties, I could tell that the student body felt different than Harvard’s. The range of majors that I encountered was much broader and more interesting. A Harvard Open Data Project analysis that looked at Harvard students from 2012-2021 found that around 30-40 percent of students concentrate in economics, with second place being computer science at 22.5 percent. In contrast, in 2023, Yale’s top two most popular majors were also economics and computer science; however, their distribution is only 11 percent and 6 percent respectively. No two majors dominate at Yale: instead, there’s a much larger distribution of majors across all disciplines. Because of this, the students seem to “value” majors across all fields a lot more. And unlike Harvard, I didn’t find myself repeatedly meeting students who were all studying economics.
In terms of racial and ethnic diversity, Harvard and Yale are similar. Harvard’s ethnic diversity from 2023 is 33.2 percent white, 14.4 percent Asian, 6.3 percent Black or African American, and 9.2 percent Hispanic or Latino contrasted to Yale’s from 2023 which is 35.6 percent white, 16.8 percent Asian, 6.9 percent Black or African American, and 11.5 percent Hispanic or Latino. That weekend, I met people from a vast range of ethnic, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds throughout my different endeavors. However, the biggest change was the difference in intellectual diversity. As a social studies concentrator, and someone very interested in the humanities and arts, people seemed to be curious and respectful of my intellectual endeavors.
Often, I do not feel this way at Harvard. When I started college, my interests in science and math continued into my classes. During my first semester, I took exclusively STEM classes, in addition to Expos 10. During that time, I found that many of my peers interested in STEM had a superiority complex about studying STEM, often connoting how much more difficult their concentration was than others, and largely invalidating pursuits in the humanities or arts. Now, as a social studies concentrator, I feel those same judgments and viewpoints projected onto me by nearly everyone I interact with. I have a very small sample size to work with, it’s clear that people at Yale felt more interested and less dismissive.
With this increased intellectual diversity at Yale, I was interested to hear what people were doing after college. In my experience, Harvard has a very strong emphasis on finance, consulting, and computer programming, leaving other job fields behind. Harvard does not do a good job of exposing people to options and opportunities outside of finance and consulting. For instance, I only learned about the Mahindra Humanities Center earlier this week. Harvard’s issue isn’t a lack of resources, but rather a lack of open dialogue about what student’s options are after college.
While not everyone was happy with the job boards and services at Yale, students noted that finance and consulting were consistently the most common job outcomes. However, students felt that while they could go into many different fields, they ultimately chose finance or consulting because of the salaries. I’m not sure if it’s a product of the culture of opportunities, but finance and consulting dominate to a stronger extent at Harvard. A Harvard Crimson survey found that in the 2024 Harvard graduating class (of the 955 respondents), 50 percent of students go into finance, consulting, and tech post-grad. Whereas at Yale, in their 2024 graduating class, only 39 percent of students go into finance, consulting, and programming or software engineering. As a result, it feels like there are more people interested in a wider variety of professions at Yale.
In looking at the schools as institutions, in terms of what Yale does better than Harvard, I could dive into the fact that Yale has not mismanaged their endowment for the better part of two decades, or how they do not seem to have presidential controversy every other year. But that is not what I chose to highlight. Does Harvard do an amazing job as an institution looking out to the rest of the world? No. Does Yale do a better job in that regard? Probably not. However, I don’t really care much about commenting on the school as an institution, because I am extremely far removed from the board of overseers and largely uninterested in it.
And I know this article may come off as brash, negative, or make you think I am a hater. That’s not the point. I wanted to examine several aspects of student life and housing, areas in which Yale blows Harvard out of the water, and reflect on whether we as students or the institution could be doing a better job. Far too often people get their feelings hurt when people are critical. That is not the intention. But rather, through difficult conversations and thoughts about what we can be doing better, everyone can live a happier Harvard experience.
Luke Wagner ’26 (lukewagner@college.harvard.edu) has a much greater appreciation for Yale after his visit and wonders what his life would have looked like if he had gone to Yale.