I Went to Harvard. You Shouldn’t. Part I

A multi-piece exploration of the rot at the top.

Note: This is Part I in a series. Part II can be found here.

“You’ll never get accepted here,” my dad told my brother in a Cambridge hotel room. “This is where brilliant kids go, kids who get 1600s on their SATs.”

My dad isn’t a person who says things to cut others down. He’s one of the kindest humans I know, so I remember thinking this statement to my brother was wholly out of character.

Looking back on that day, my dad says he was trying to manage my brother’s expectations.

My older brother Eric was and is brilliant. He works hard at it, putting more hours into studying back then, doctoring now.

Yet, he had a 1420 on his SATs, which my dad (and frankly, my brother at the time) believed would immediately preclude his chance at admission.

What we didn’t know was that there was a far more insidious process at work. Harvard is surrounded by the gates of privilege, and few who are born without money and power are allowed to pass through. Being a “legacy,” meaning that one’s parents and/or grandparents went to Harvard, awards a student a 40% greater chance at admission.

Less than a year later, in April of 2000, my brother was accepted to Harvard’s Class of 2004. In the driveway, he taped the acceptance letter to the back of his car so it would be the first thing my dad saw when he pulled in from work.

My dad was overjoyed, yet stunned. He couldn’t believe it.

I could. I knew how fiercely smart and hardworking my brother was. I believed Harvard admissions were a meritocracy, and even though my brother didn’t have perfect SATs, he busted his ass in school. He took on meaningful extracurriculars. He wrote a moving personal statement about his complex relationship with our grandfather, a Holocaust survivor.

He worked hard and was rewarded for it. That’s the American Dream, right?

It reinforced my false belief that anyone in this country can do anything if they set their mind to it.

I didn’t yet understand privilege.

My brother and I were both privileged, not nearly as much as the average Harvard student, but enough.

We came from a solidly middle-class family in a middle-class suburb with excellent public schools. The first few years of our lives, our grandparents paid for us to go to a private Jewish school, which laid a strong foundation for our education. We came from a two-parent home where both parents worked full-time jobs, yet were available. My dad has worked at the same engineering firm since 1975, the year he graduated Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey. My mom was a dedicated civil servant, part of the first women’s class to officially graduate from Rutgers the same year as my dad. Her parents were Holocaust survivors who believed she should go to work after high school, but she resisted. She went to the local community college for two years and finished at Rutgers.

My brother and I had a solid background, and there was another factor at play.

Despite being in a minority and historically-oppressed religion, we were and are white cisgender straight men, the most privileged class in America.

It was enough to pave a smooth path on the road to Harvard for both of us.

What happened once we got there, however, was vastly different.

“You only got into Harvard because of your brother,” a frenemy of mine said during senior spring of high school. I didn’t point out that I had also been accepted to Princeton, but only because I already knew how much this guy was seething with anger.

He was a white, Christian young man from a staunchly Republican family, and he was deferred and then rejected from Harvard.

I didn’t believe I deserved to go to Harvard, and he shared that viewpoint. He told me as much, while also extolling his own virtues and how perfectly he would fit in there.

This was also a guy who once proclaimed to me that, “Nobody in America has the right to be unemployed,” so let’s say I was already aware of what little touch he had with reality at the time.

So I agreed with him. “Yes,” I said, “I only got accepted because of my brother.”

While I was lying in that moment, I came to believe more and more during my undergraduate years that I didn’t deserve to be at Harvard, though not because of my aptitude. I was intelligent and hard-working, but I never escaped the feeling that I didn’t belong in so many other ways.

When I entered as a freshman in the fall of 2002, I was two months into rigorous medical treatment for a benign, golfball sized brain tumor near my pituitary gland. Junior and senior year of high school were mostly spent sleeping and studying, since the mystery illness sapped my strength. I suffered crippling migraine headaches and had to take a two-hour nap every day after school. Despite years of doctor visits, I wasn’t diagnosed until two weeks before graduation.

The first person I met at Harvard, one of my roommates, was an internationally-accomplished musician who had toured the world. He graduated from a posh private school, and there was an almost British lilt to his voice.

As we moved one of the desks from the bedroom to the common area, we had to tilt it on a diagonal to get it through the doorframe.

“Aha,” he said. “What would Pythagoras say?”

I inwardly cringed.

I only spent a month as his roommate, since my illness and the painful treatment made work and studying impossible. I was receiving generous financial aid, mostly need-based grants, and I worried what would happen if I left school.

Harvard was accommodating. They allowed me to withdraw and enter the next fall, agreeing to the same financial aid package and charging my family nothing for the month I spent there. I was stunned. Shouldn’t I be punished for wasting everyone’s time?

It was the first time I recognized the meaning of the phrase, “The hardest part of Harvard is getting in.”

I would later witness how Harvard catered to its students. I watched children of elite families skip class yet get rewarded with “the gentleman’s B.” The two times I got a B, I deserved the grade based on what I viewed as my poor performance.

It was crushing to me, expected for others.

In September of 2003, I entered Harvard again as a freshman. I had my first neurosurgery in June of that year, and I was feeling better than I ever had in all of my teenaged years.

I enjoyed my freshman year. I took interesting classes, made a handful of friends, and decided on my major — or “concentration,” in Harvard parlance.

Nevertheless, I made a critical error. I assumed everyone would be like me: from a middle-class family, possessing a self-cultivated love of learning, and grateful to be at one of the best universities in the world.

What I discovered were undergraduates reared in worlds far more privileged than mine, who expected life to unfurl before them as easily as it always had.

In my four years, I heard countless complaints that, “Harvard is awful,” and not in the ways it actually was.

The education wasn’t good enough, they said.

The professors and lowly instructors weren’t well-credentialed and were also lazy and inaccessible, they said (meanwhile, I visited many professors’ weekly office hours to find I was the only student there).

The social life wasn’t good enough, neither were the food or resources, they said.

After a freshman expository writing class in the basement of Memorial Hall, I went with my fellow classmates to have lunch at posh Annenberg, the freshman dining hall.

Several students complained about the meal. Granted the food wasn’t five-star restaurant quality, but it was good and plentiful.

A classmate who had been raised off-the-grid, below the poverty line, and was homeschooled broke down in tears.

“You don’t know how good you guys have it,” she said, smacking her tray down before carrying it away.

There was a moment of silence, then laughter.

A few of my classmates made fun of her as we watched her exit from afar. I regret not speaking up.

I was afraid they would discover that I, too, didn’t belong.

Freshman year, TheFacebook.com exploded on campus. I rolled my eyes initially, since I saw it as another yardstick for Harvard students to measure their worth. It was.

At the end of the first week, a friend told me, “I have over 1,000 friends!”

“There are 6,600 undergrads on campus,” I said. “You can’t possibly know one-sixth of them.”

“Fuck you,” he said. “You’re just jealous.”

I wasn’t, but there were times at Harvard that I was jealous of access and privilege.

I had a small group of close friends, most who shared backgrounds like mine. But the more I explored social circles, the more out of place I felt.

I discovered how many acquaintances were legacies whose parents and/or grandparents graduated from Harvard or Radcliffe College, the all-women institution that wasn’t fully integrated into Harvard until 1999.

Then I slowly discovered the wealth. People kept that closer to the vest.

Once a classmate asked me how I’d be spending spring break.

“Just taking the bus home, spending some time with family,” I said.

“That’s nice, I think I might stay stateside too,” they said. “We have a villa in Tuscany, and my mom wants me to go with my siblings to our place in Monaco and then the south of France, but I’ll probably end up in Miami. It’ll be quieter there.”

I was stunned. I’d never met someone who owned property, let alone multiple properties abroad.

Or maybe I had, and I just didn’t know it.

The advent of Facebook photo finally showed me just how privileged my classmates were. Most were modest about sharing photos, but you could still get an idea of just how many places these people were going while I was was spending quality time with the family dog, who I missed more than anything.

The two primary reasons I would advise prospective students against going to Harvard revolve around education and privilege.

The truth that top-tier schools don’t want you to know is that the education is comparable at most of the Top 250 universities and colleges.

If you work hard and apply yourself, you can excel anywhere.

I won’t deny that Harvard™, the brand name, can open doors for you on certain career paths, especially finance. But oftentimes, those that benefit most are the ones who come to Harvard with a high level of privilege anyway. No matter where they are educated, they end up with the same level of access to desirable careers upon graduation that most others don’t. They can also afford to take competitive unpaid internships in cities like New York and San Francisco, where costs of living are high.

At Harvard, I took fascinating classes that changed the way I see the world. For every one of those, however, there were a dozen more I sampled and found unbearable, mostly because of the professors. When you hire the most esteemed names in their fields, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are talented at teaching their area of expertise.

Thus, there are plenty of classes at Harvard that are maddeningly specific.

Want to take a class on 19th century Russian literature?

Well, there’s only a class on Chekhov that discusses three of his plays because that’s what the instructor covered in their graduate thesis. True story.

The second reason not to attend is the abundance of privilege.

If you weren’t raised upper-middle class at the very least, Harvard can be a strange place. I’m not saying kids who grow up with incredible privilege are any better or worse people than the rest of us. There are simply undeniable cultural differences. For example, I was shocked at the casual way some students viewed cocaine use, since in my high school, even weed was a rarity because it was way more expensive than alcohol. (I will discuss privilege further in Parts II & III of this series.)

The one positive about Harvard that sets it apart from most schools is that they offer incredible financial aid. Very few schools are truly need-blind in admissions, and Harvard is one that claims to be. Also, if your family makes $80,000 per year or less, you can go to Harvard tuition-free.

If affording college is going to be impossible for you and you’re admitted to Harvard, you should definitely go.

But if it’s going to put you and your family in debt compared to other universities, perhaps schools that offer you scholarships or have lower in-state tuition rates, then I’d say it’s not worth it.

Harvard is as good of a school as any other, yet I’m hesitant to claim it’s far better.

In Part II, I delve deeper into more reasons not to go, including an exploration of Final Clubs, the misogynistic epicenter of campus rape culture at Harvard.

Read on here: