According to the Boston Globe, a recently leaked internal memo reveals that student satisfaction at Harvard College (the undergraduate component of the university) ranks near the bottom of the 31 colleges in COFHE, the Consortium on Financing Higher Education. COFHE includes all eight Ivy League schools, as well as MIT, Stanford and a number of elite small colleges.

The Globe reports that "the 21-page memo, from staff researchers at Harvard to academic deans, documents student dissatisfaction with faculty availability, quality of instruction, quality of advising and student life factors such as sense of community and social life on campus."

None of us in Kentucky—or anywhere else for that matter--can argue with Harvard’s 369-year history as one of the world’s greatest institutions of higher learning. I for one stand in awe of the value America's first college brings to research and scholarship in countless academic areas, but the COFHE survey reveals Harvard to be weak in the very areas where select smaller institutions excel. This is certainly the case at a number of colleges focused on undergraduate liberal arts and sciences, including the institution I serve, Centre College.

The Globe article reports that at Harvard "students can go through four years on campus with limited contact with professors. They often take large lecture classes, divided into sections headed by graduate student ‘teaching fellows.’ Small classes are frequently taught by temporary instructors instead of regular, tenure-track professors. And in many cases, advisers are not professors, either, but graduate students, administrators or full-time advisers."

The Princeton Review’s article on Centre presents a contrasting approach toward undergraduate education: "Faculty and staff provide extensive support to students; explains one undergrad, ‘People here are committed to our undergraduate studies. They’re eager for us to succeed, so they make themselves available to us all of the time. They even give us their home telephone numbers and invite us into their homes ….’"

A recently published report by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) shows Centre in the 95th percentile, on average, across five benchmarks designed to measure what students gain from their college experience. The benchmarks covered by NSSE are:

• level of academic challenge
• active and collaborative learning
• student interactions with faculty
• enriching educational experiences
• supportive campus environment

As they have done since the study's inception, Centre’s NSSE scores reveal the College to be one of the most successful institutions in the country in educationally enriching the lives of its students.

While the bad news about Harvard (made to appear more dramatic than warranted in my opinion) only surfaced in a leaked memo, Centre follows a policy of transparency regarding its student experience and attitudes. In fact, it is one of only five colleges to have participated in NSSE every year and made all its NSSE results available to the public.

Centre and Harvard are connected as top-tier academic institutions, just as they were connected by an epic football game in 1921—as all true football aficionados in the Commonwealth know, a contest won 6-0 by the underdogs from Danville.  For example, this summer Centre junior Shariya Terrell of Bowling Green is attending Harvard as a participant in the 10-week Summer Honors Undergraduate Program, as have other Centre students in the past. And Charlie Boyd, a junior from Danville, is also at Harvard this summer as part of the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program.

While some would dream of a Centre-Harvard rematch on the gridiron, I am satisfied to affirm that both kinds of institutions—Harvard and other premier research institutions as well as Centre and others in the Annapolis Group, a 115-member consortium of the nation’s leading liberal arts colleges—represent our nation's strength in higher education.  America is blessed to have the world’s strongest and most varied system of higher education, and our students in Kentucky and around the country are the beneficiaries of this circumstance.

John Roush is president of Centre College and Presidential Fellow of The Annapolis Group of independent liberal arts colleges.