Yale students want to impress you with what they're doing. Harvard students want to impress you with how cool they look while doing it.
Everyone praises Harvard 'for the students.' But what makes Harvard's students so great is that they are, in many ways, a cross-section of the larger world. They are normal people who happen to be excellent, and this sets them apart. People who go to Yale go because they want to attend Yale. People who go to Harvard go because they can.
I moved to Harvard in 1998, and in 2000 the first kidney exchange in the United States was done at a hospital nearby. I started to think, 'Gee, there might be a way where I could help organize it, make it easier for people to find kidneys.'
I don't think I could have thought of any place other than Stanford to leave Harvard for.
My father is a poet. He's a literary giant of this country - writes in Hindi - and also quite unique because he has a Ph.D. in English Literature. He taught at Harvard University, which is one of the most prominent universities in the country.
By playing on people's desire to belong to groups, Facebook creates a new, inclusive society. After all, Facebook is not like Harvard College. Anyone with access to the Internet can sign up.
Americans don't realize how difficult it is to create a Harvard.
After I finished school, I went to JJ College of Architecture and then to Harvard. I did my B.A. with a major in filmmaking.
A large number of students around the world don't really have access to high quality education. So, launching EdX allows students all over the world to have much better access to a high quality education from a university such as Harvard, MIT, Berkeley and others as we add more universities.
EdX will be a creating a platform which will be open source, not for profit, and a portal for a website where universities will offer their courses. For example, MIT courses will be offered as MITx and Harvard courses as HarvardX.
