Academic life at Harvard University

Teaching and education

Main article: Harvard College
This four-year, full-time undergraduate program focuses on the liberal arts and sciences.[74][75] To graduate in the usual four years, undergraduates typically take four courses per semester.[78] In most majors, an honors degree requires advanced coursework and a senior thesis.[79] Although some introductory courses have large enrollments, the average class size is 12 students.[80]

Research

Harvard University is a founding member of the Association of American Universities[81] and a prominent research university with “very high” (R1) research activity and comprehensive doctoral programs in the arts, sciences, engineering, and medicine according to the Carnegie Classification.

With the Faculty of Medicine consistently ranking first among medical schools for scientific research,[82] biomedical research is an area of particular strength for the University. More than 11,000 faculty members and more than 1,600 graduate students conduct research at the School of Medicine as well as its 15 affiliated hospitals and research institutes.[83] The School of Medicine 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.[84]

Libraries and museums

Widener Library is the center of the Harvard Library System.
The Harvard Library System is centered at the Widener Library at Harvard Yard and includes approximately 80 individual libraries containing approximately 20.4 million items.[14][15][17] According to the American Library Association, this makes it the largest academic library in the world.[15][4]

The Houghton Library, the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, and the Harvard University Archives consist primarily of rare and unique materials. The oldest collection of old and new American maps, glossaries, and atlases is stored in the Posey Library and is open to the public. The largest collection of East Asian language materials outside of East Asia is also housed at the Harvard Yanching Library.

Henry Moore sculpture “Large Reclining Figure in Four Pieces”, near Lamont Library
The Harvard Art Museums consist of three museums. The Arthur M. Sackler Museum covers Asian, Mediterranean, and Islamic art, the Bosch-Reisinger Museum (formerly the Germanic Museum) covers art of central and northern Europe, and the Vosges Museum covers Western art from the Middle Ages to the present with an emphasis on Italian, early Renaissance, and pre-British art. Raphael, French art of the nineteenth century. It includes the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the Harvard Mineral Museum, the Harvard Herbarium, which houses the Plaschka Glass Flowers, and the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Other museums include the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, which was designed by Le Corbusier and houses the film archive, the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, which specializes in the cultural history and civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, and the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, which houses artifacts from excavations in the Middle East.

Among overall rankings, the Academic Ranking of World Universities (“ARWU”) has ranked Harvard as the best university in the world every year since its release.[95] When QS World University Rankings and Times Higher Education collaborated to publish the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings from 2004 to 2009, Harvard ranked first each year and continued to hold first place in the World Reputation Rankings. Since its release in 2011.[96] In 2019, it was ranked #1 globally by SCImago Enterprise Rankings.[97]

Among the specific indicator rankings, Harvard University topped both the University Rankings by Academic Performance (2019-2020) and Mines ParisTech: Professional Rankings of World Universities (2011), which measures the number of university graduates who hold CEO positions in Fortune companies. Global 500.[98] According to annual polls conducted by the Princeton Review, Harvard University is consistently among the top most popular colleges in the United States, the dream of both students and parents.[99][100][101] Additionally, having made significant investments in its engineering school in recent years, Harvard University was ranked third globally for engineering and technology in 2019 by Times Higher Education.[102]