Academics




Teaching and learning

Harvard is a large, highly residential research university offering 50 undergraduate majors, 134 graduate degrees, and 32 professional degrees. For the 2018–2019 academic year, Harvard granted 1,665 baccalaureate degrees, 1,013 graduate degrees, and 5,695 professional degrees.

The four-year, full-time undergraduate program has a liberal arts and sciences focus. To graduate in the usual four years, undergraduates normally take four courses per semester. In most majors, an honors degree requires advanced coursework and a senior thesis. Though some introductory courses have large enrollments, the median class size is 12 students.

Research

Harvard is a founding member of the Association of American Universities and a preeminent research university with "very high" research activity (R1) and comprehensive doctoral programs across the arts, sciences, engineering, and medicine according to the Carnegie Classification.

With the medical school consistently ranking first among medical schools for research, biomedical research is an area of particular strength for the university. More than 11,000 faculty members and over 1,600 medical and graduate students contribute to discovery and innovation at the medical school as well as its 15 affiliated hospitals and research institutes. The Medical School and its affiliates attracted $1.65 billion in competitive research grants from the National Institutes of Health in 2019, more than twice as much as any other university.

Research opportunities are available to undergraduates as well, as early as their freshman year. Numerous mechanisms for funding and faculty mentorship are available during both term-time and the summer.

Libraries and museums

The Harvard Library system is centered in Widener Library in Harvard Yard and comprises nearly 80 individual libraries holding about 20.4 million items. According to the American Library Association, this makes it the largest academic library in the world.

Houghton Library, the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, and the Harvard University Archives consist principally of rare and unique materials. America's oldest collection of maps, gazetteers, and atlases both old and new is stored in Pusey Library and open to the public. The largest collection of East-Asian language material outside of East Asia is held in the Harvard-Yenching Library.

The Harvard Art Museums comprise three museums. The Arthur M. Sackler Museum covers Asian, Mediterranean, and Islamic art, the Busch–Reisinger Museum (formerly the Germanic Museum) covers central and northern European art, and the Fogg Museum covers Western art from the Middle Ages to the present emphasizing Italian early Renaissance, British pre-Raphaelite, and 19th-century French art. The Harvard Museum of Natural History includes the Harvard Mineralogical Museum, the Harvard University Herbaria featuring the Blaschka Glass Flowers exhibit, and the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Other museums include the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, designed by Le Corbusier and housing the film archive, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, specializing in the cultural history and civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, and the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East featuring artifacts from excavations in the Middle East.

Reputation and rankings

University rankings
National
ARWU 1
Forbes 1
THE/WSJ 1
U.S. News & World Report 2
Washington Monthly 2
Global
ARWU 1
QS 3
THE 3
U.S. News & World Report 1

Among overall rankings, the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) has ranked Harvard as the world's top university every year since it was released. When QS and Times Higher Education collaborated to publish the Times Higher Education–QS World University Rankings from 2004 to 2009, Harvard held the top spot every year and continued to hold first place on THE World Reputation Rankings ever since it was released in 2011. In 2019, it was ranked first worldwide by SCImago Institutions Rankings.

Among rankings of specific indicators, Harvard topped both the University Ranking by Academic Performance (2019–2020) and Mines ParisTech: Professional Ranking of World Universities (2011), which measured universities' numbers of alumni holding CEO positions in Fortune Global 500 companies. According to annual polls done by The Princeton Review, Harvard is consistently among the top two most commonly named "dream colleges" in the United States, both for students and parents. Additionally, having made significant investments in its engineering school in recent years, Harvard was ranked third worldwide for Engineering and Technology in 2019 by Times Higher Education.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Notable people

Image
Alumni This section contains an unencyclopedic or excessive gallery of images . Please help improve the section by removing excessive or indiscriminate images or by moving relevant images beside adjacent text, in accordance with the Manual of Style on use of images. (October 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) Over more than three and a half centuries, Harvard alumni have contributed creatively and significantly to society, the arts and sciences, business, and national and international affairs. Harvard's alumni include eight U.S. presidents, 188 living billionaires, 79 Nobel laureates, 7 Fields Medal winners, 9 Turing Award laureates, 369 Rhodes Scholars, 252 Marshall Scholars, and 13 Mitchell Scholars. Harvard students and alumni have also won 10 Academy Awards, 48 Pulitzer Prizes, and 108 Olympic medals (including 46 gold medals), and they have founded many notable companies worldwide. Notable Harvard alumni include: 2nd President of the United Stat...
Read more

Organization and administration

Image
Governance School Founded Harvard College 1636 Medicine 1782 Divinity 1816 Law 1817 Dental Medicine 1867 Arts and Sciences 1872 Business 1908 Extension 1910 Design 1914 Education 1920 Public Health 1922 Government 1936 Engineering and Applied Sciences 2007 Harvard is governed by a combination of its Board of Overseers and the President and Fellows of Harvard College (also known as the Harvard Corporation), which in turn appoints the President of Harvard University. There are 16,000 staff and faculty, including 2,400 professors, lecturers, and instructors. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is the largest Harvard faculty and has primary responsibility for instruction in Harvard College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Division of Continuing Education, which includes Harvard Summer School and Harvard Extension School. There are nine other graduate and professional faculties as well as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. J...
Read more