A Comprehensive Answer to which Elite College is Best

You've probably heard alumni of Harvard and Yale sneering at each other, while wondering whether either of them really know as much as they think they do. A better question may be whether they know the right things. Thanks to the Open Syllabus project, we can now say which of these universities offers the best education. The answer is: the University of Chicago, with the University of Pennsylvania in second place.

I make this judgment based on the most-read books in their courses; obviously it doesn't measure how well the books are taught. Still, in any university much depends on the student. The University of Chicago list is short on Plato and Homer, but is overall the strongest list. The Princeton list, by contrast, contains only three books of lasting value: Thucydides, Schumpeter, and Henry Kissenger's Diplomacy. (I suppose some people would argue for Weber.) Harvard's list is likewise mostly fashionable noise, although it has a few highlights: Dr. King's letter, Machiavelli, and Rawls (though reading Rawls without Aristotle is like making a stew out of a rich marrow bone, and then just eating the bone).

Yale's list has both works of Homer's, which is good, and I thought Ralph Ellison's book was very insightful (but of interest probably chiefly to Americans). They also read Tocqueville (also especially of interest to Americans). Amazingly, you have to go all the way down the list to Columbia to get Kant; but it is to their credit that the work you then encounter is the later Metaphysics of Morals, and not the earlier and more-often read Groundwork. The latter is much more famous because it is where he lays out the overarching moral theory, including three formulations of the Categorical Imperative. But the later work offers a much richer picture of his actual moral vision. He anticipated JS Mill's harm principle, although he isn't usually credited for doing so, in his division between cases where state coercion is acceptable, and cases that are moral questions but matters for individual virtue. And it is only in the late work that you learn how completely he believed his Groundwork concepts would recreate Christian morality from the ground of pure practical reason.

The University of Chicago, however, gives first place to Aristotle -- the top two places are for Aristotle's Ethics, most likely always the Nicomachean Ethics but possibly occasionally the less-read Eudemian Ethics. They also read Kant's late work, St. Augustine, and both famous works of Machiavelli. (His Art of War is of no interest except for students of period warfare, as he has largely dramatized Vegetius with very few updates, none of which turn out to be of universal or lasting value).

The University of Pennsylvania is not as philosophically strong, but does include several excellent dramatic approaches to understanding life. Chaucer, Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, Sophocles, and Benjamin Franklin join Plato there, not rising to inclusion on the most read lists anywhere else. It's a good list, and marks a different approach but a valid one.