Transcription
If you had to name one, just one, what's the most prestigious university in the world that immediately pops into your head? Don't overthink the definition of prestige. Forget the global rankings published in magazines. I'm talking about overall perception. Chances are, in much of Asia, especially East Asia, there's really one name people default to. You could ask a Korean middle school student, you could ask a Chinese parent, or even a Japanese grandparent, and you'll probably hear the same name. Harvard.
But here is the interesting part. Harvard is just one American university, one of eight schools in what's known as the Ivy League. And you could easily argue that universities like Yale, Princeton, or Stanford are just as prestigious and just as selective. Then there are UK universities like Oxford or Cambridge. So why is it that across Asia, perception-wise, there's just one name that feels head and shoulders above the rest? How did Harvard become the universal shortcut for the best among Asians? And when I say Asians, I should be more specific. The Harvard obsession is more intense in East Asia, countries like China, South Korea, and Japan. A South Asian country like India has its own education obsession, but it's centered more on engineering and schools like MIT and Stanford. Then, of course, I can draw a further distinction between Asian Americans and Asians from Asia because there's a separate controversy involving allegations of discrimination against Asian American students in Harvard's admissions process. But before we get into all that, we need to answer a more fundamental question. Just how did Harvard become Harvard? Was it luck, timing, or was it by design? Let's dive in.
On paper, there's one obvious reason why Harvard seems to have an almost unmatched grip on brand perception in Asia. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher education in the US. How old? As of today, it's 390 years old. It's so old that America as a country wasn't even born yet. The United States was founded in 1776. Harvard was founded a full 140 years earlier in 1636. So how is it possible that a university could be founded before a country? Let me set the scenario. It's the 1630s. There is no United States yet, just a cluster of English colonies on the edge of North America. One of them is the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a new settlement stretching around a cold, rocky inlet on the Atlantic Coast in what is now New England. Over the course of that decade, roughly 20,000 English Puritans made the dangerous Atlantic crossing to this colony and the surrounding region. These Puritans were English Protestants who believed that the Church of England was still too close to Catholicism and spiritually corrupt, with too much hierarchy and too many elaborate ceremonies. In 1630s England, holding those beliefs and speaking out about them could get you imprisoned, mutilated, or killed. So tens of thousands of them got on boats and crossed the Atlantic to start over in New England. And almost immediately after they set a basic shelter and a working government there, they did something that might seem a little insane given the circumstances. They founded a college. Think about it. They had barely survived their first winters. Starvation was a real threat. And yet the colonial government, made up entirely of Puritans, voted to put £400 towards building a college. That was almost the colony's entire annual tax take, raised mostly through property levies and flat tax charges per person. The college site, an old cow pasture in a small town called Newtown, which they would later rename Cambridge, after the famous English University town where many of these leaders had studied before crossing the Atlantic. In that sense, the founder of Harvard wasn't even a single person. It was the colony itself acting through the Massachusetts Bay General Court, the legislature that voted in 1636 to create and fund the college. And it wasn't even called Harvard then. It was just referred to as the College or New College.
The name Harvard only came along in 1638 when a young English minister named John Harvard arrived in the colony. He was 30 years old, a graduate of Emmanuel College at Cambridge in England, and relatively wealthy by colonial standards. But within a year of arriving, he contracted tuberculosis and died. He had lived in Massachusetts for barely a year and a half. On his deathbed, John Harvard made a decision that would echo through nearly four centuries. He willed half of his estate, about 780 pounds, and his entire personal library of roughly 400 books to the struggling little college. In a colony where books were extremely rare and money even rarer, this was a transformative gift. The colonial government was so grateful that in 1639, they ordered the college to be renamed Harvard College in his honor. If you visit Harvard today, there's a famous bronze statue in Harvard Yard that students and tourists line up to take photos with. It even appeared in the movie The Social Network. I saw it myself when I was invited to speak at Harvard recently, and the inscription reads, "John Harvard, founder, 1638." Here's the irony. Every part of that line is wrong. That's why people call it the Statue of Three Lies. First, the statue isn't actually John Harvard because no portrait or image of him ever existed. The sculptor in 1884 just used a random student named Sherman Hoar as his model. Second, Harvard wasn't the founder. He was the first major donor. As I said earlier, the colony's government itself founded the school. And third, the date is wrong. Harvard was founded in 1636 not 1638. So the most iconic symbol on a campus built around Veritas, which is Harvard's official motto, meaning truth in Latin, is in reality a tongue-in-cheek monument whose inscription is wrong on all three counts. And Harvard seems perfectly happy to keep the inside joke going.
But the college itself was very real, and it began racking up many firsts almost immediately. In 1638, Harvard received the first printing press in British North America, and that press produced the first book printed in the English-speaking colonies. In 1650, Harvard received a formal charter from the colonial government, making the Harvard Corporation the first legally incorporated entity in the American colonies. So Harvard wasn't just the first college in North America. It became the first legally incorporated corporation in what would later become the United States. And then it started producing the people who literally built the United States. By the time of the American Revolution, Harvard graduates who sided with the Independence Movement outnumbered those who stayed loyal to the British Crown by about seven to one. Rebel troops fighting under George Washington were housed in Harvard's buildings during the siege of Boston in 1775. And Washington himself used the Harvard's President's house as his headquarters. Eight Harvard alumni went on to sign the Declaration of Independence. Eight US presidents, including John F. Kennedy, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama attended Harvard. Over 150 Nobel Prize winners, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, who both famously dropped out but still carry the Harvard name.
But here is what really separated Harvard from every other colonial college. Money. And specifically, the kind of people who started giving it. Between 1815 and 1855, Harvard stopped being just a training ground for ministers and became the finishing school for Boston's wealthiest families. Parents began sending their children to Harvard College for the sake of its social advantages. By 1870, state funding had dried up, and the school's Board of Overseers, once filled with politicians and ministers, had been entirely replaced by wealthy alumni from Boston's upper class business community. Harvard was privatized, elite, and rich. And this was before the real transformation even began.
The real transformation came in 1869 in the form of a 35-year-old chemistry professor from MIT named Charles William Eliot. What Eliot did over the next 40 years was nothing short of revolutionary. Before him, Harvard was a provincial New England College with a rigid, almost completely fixed curriculum. Students had no say in what they studied. Chapel attendance was mandatory. So, Eliot abolished compulsory chapel and scrapped the Greek language requirement. He introduced letter grades, and most importantly, he created the elective system, letting students choose their own courses for the first time. He expanded the faculty and pushed the idea that a real liberal education had to include both the humanities and the sciences. He also drove the creation and expansion of graduate and professional schools like Harvard Law School, and what would later become Harvard Business School. Basically, Charles Eliot turned Harvard from a small regional college into a full-fledged research university, modeled after the German research universities that were seen as the gold standard of higher education at the time. By the time Eliot retired in 1909, Harvard had roughly 4,000 students in total, about four times the enrollment when he started, plus around 10 times as many faculty, and nearly 11 times the endowment.
Now, if you don't know what an endowment is, think of it as Harvard's Investment Fund, a giant pool of money donated over time, which the university invests and then spends a small slice of its returns every year to pay for salaries, buildings, research, and financial aid. By the way, take a guess how big Harvard's endowment is. The money has been compounding for almost 400 years. So maybe you're thinking $1 billion? How about $10 billion? As of June 30th, 2025, Harvard's endowment is actually almost $57 billion, which makes it the wealthiest university in the world. That money is managed by Harvard's investment arm called Harvard Management Company, which was set up in 1974. But how is it possible that they're sitting on that much money even if it's been compounding for centuries? Big part of it is investment returns. Over the years, Harvard's endowment has invested in tech giants like Apple, Google, and Facebook. In 2025, Harvard even made headlines for putting almost $442 million into Bitcoin through a large Bitcoin investment fund run by BlackRock. But most of these bets are not Harvard buying shares directly in its own name. They're often made indirectly through big private equity and venture capital funds. So you won't see Harvard listed as an investor next to the company logos that the public recognizes.
Anyway, from our research, it does appear that Harvard had a series of visionary leaders who doubled down on Eliot's 40-year revolution, intentionally expanding globally-focused institutes and policy programs that attracted international talent and trained future leaders from around the world. Over time, Harvard fused age, wealth, state power, private capital, and global relationships into a single institution. Yale was prestigious. Princeton was elite. But Harvard became something slightly different. It became deeply intertwined with American political leadership, finance, law, diplomacy, and science. In other words, Harvard didn't just educate the powerful. It became part of the machinery of American power itself. Hard to see that as pure luck. And that mattered enormously to countries outside the US that were trying to understand, compete with, or catch up to a rising American superpower. Because if you wanted access to that power, not just knowledge, but I'm talking about influence, Harvard increasingly looked like the front door.
And that's where we have to flip the lens and look at the demand side from Asia, because that's where Harvard's carefully built brand met a culture and a moment in history that were perfectly primed to turn one American university into the ultimate prize. Quick question for you. When do you think Harvard made first contact with Asia? The 1950s? Maybe after World War II? Try the 1870s. I already talked about the impact Charles Eliot had during his first tenure as President of Harvard. But as early as 1872, Eliot was already positioning Harvard as a global institution. That same year, Japan's Iwakura Mission, one of the most important diplomatic missions in modern Japanese history, toured the United States to study Western political, educational, and industrial systems. Japan had just opened itself after centuries of isolation and was racing to modernize before Western powers could dominate it. When the delegation arrived in Boston, Eliot was one of the central hosts. The mission was also received by some of America's leading intellectual figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Iwakura Mission included future Japanese Prime Minister and cabinet ministers. These were the people who would go back and reshape Japan's government, military, and education system. And Harvard was right there in the room. Then in 1879, Harvard did something no other American university was doing at the time. It brought over a scholar from Ningbo, China, Ge Kunhua, to become its first instructor of Mandarin Chinese. So clearly, Harvard was actively building academic bridges to the East before the 20th century had even begun.
But to truly understand why Asian elites began to see Harvard as the ultimate prize, we have to look at what can only be described as a bizarre historical accident, one that effectively hardwired American higher education into the DNA of Asia's modern elite. Let's turn to China. In 1900, the uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion had erupted. At the time, China was ruled by the Qing dynasty, an empire already weakened by decades of military defeats, unequal treaties, and foreign spheres of influence carved out by Western powers. Many Chinese saw missionaries, foreign soldiers, and Western businesses in China as symbols of national humiliation. The Boxers were a socialist movement that turned violently against foreigners and Chinese Christians. But the rebellion was crushed by an eight-nation alliance that included the United States. Under what became known as the Boxer Protocol, the Qing government was forced to pay huge financial penalties to the victorious powers. It was a truly humiliating moment for China. But a few years later, the US government under President Theodore Roosevelt did something highly calculated. Realizing they had extracted more money from China than necessary to cover their damages, the US decided to remit a portion of that money back to China, but with a major string attached. The funds had to be used to create a scholarship program to send Chinese students to study in America. The American goal here was explicitly geopolitical. They wanted to educate China's next generation of leaders to ensure American influence over the region for decades to come. To prepare these students for the rigorous American college system, a prep school was founded in Beijing in 1911 using these exact funds. You might have heard of it. Today, it's called Tsinghua University, and it's arguably the most prestigious university in all of China. This is the moment that the seed was planted, because Tsinghua was essentially founded as a pipeline to elite American schools, the absolute pinnacle of Chinese domestic education became permanently, spiritually linked to Harvard, which by then had already become synonymous with American political and institutional power. And Harvard didn't just sit and passively accept these students. In 1928, it doubled down by establishing the Harvard-Yenching Institute, a partnership that helped develop academic departments at universities inside China and later across East Asia. It also funded the creation of the Harvard-Yenching Library, which to this day holds one of the largest collections of East Asian research materials of any university outside of Asia. What's fascinating is that from the late 1990s, the Chinese Communist Party began sending large numbers of mid-career and senior bureaucrats to Harvard Kennedy School for executive training programs. In some Chinese circles, Harvard developed a reputation as the ultimate party school outside the country. And it's not just the officials, it's the children, the so-called "princelings." Even current Chinese President Xi Jinping's daughter is widely reported to have studied at Harvard as an undergraduate on their pseudonym. In recent years, as the US-China relations have soured, Harvard's perceived ties to the Chinese government have come under growing scrutiny from American politicians, and this will become important later when we talk about the Harvard mission process. Think about it. When China's ruling elite repeatedly chooses Harvard for its own training, what kind of message does that send to ordinary Chinese families? For a Chinese parent, sending a child to Harvard isn't just about getting a world-class education. It's about proximity to power, plugging them into the same global networks that serve top officials, business tycoons, and policymakers.
So that's China. But Harvard ran a similar playbook with Japan. After those early contacts in 1870s, Japanese students began enrolling at Harvard, especially in the law school. Two early Japanese Harvard law graduates, Komura Juntaro and Kaneko Kentaro, later helped President Roosevelt negotiate the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. That put Harvard-trained Japanese lawyers at the center of a global peace deal that reshaped power in East Asia. By the early 1900s, sons of wealthy Japanese families were coming to Harvard not only for the education, but also for the social access, joining exclusive clubs, sometimes alongside the future American presidents, like Franklin D. Roosevelt. When Harvard President Charles Eliot visited Japan in 1912, he was received with full honors and granted a private audience with the Emperor, a sign of just how prestigious Harvard had become in Japanese elite circles. Then during and after World War II, a Harvard professor named Edwin O'Reischauer basically pioneered Modern Academic Study of Japan in the United States. He spent decades at Harvard shaping how Americans understood Japan. And in 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed him as US ambassador to Japan, where he served until 1966. To the Japanese elite, Harvard wasn't just a school at that point. It was literally where some of the key architects of the US-Japan relations were trained and based.
You can also see this exact same dynamic play out in Singapore, but through a highly formalized meritocratic system. Singapore's government is famous for its efficiency, largely driven by its public service commission scholarships, which identified the brightest teenagers in the country and pay for them to study abroad on the condition that they return to work in the government. Historically, the lion's share of these top scholars are funneled directly to Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge. In fact, Harvard Kennedy School runs a program in partnership with the National University of Singapore called the "Lee Kuan Yew Fellowship," named after Singapore's legendary founding father. It is designed to train Singapore's top public officials, along with other rising Asian leaders. You see a pattern here? Leaders, officials, political power, and connections. And that's where Harvard separated itself from the pack.
So if you ask a typical Asian parent, whether they're in Seoul, Shanghai, or Singapore, why Harvard is better than Stanford or Princeton, they might not be able to fully articulate the logic, but they just feel it. It's like this, some kind of societal conditioning that's rooted in something deeper. And here I'm talking about the deeply rooted confusion the ideal of the "scholar official." Let me explain. For over a millennium, societies influenced by Confucianism, particularly China and South Korea, were governed by the imperial examination system. This was a grueling, incredibly difficult series of tests. If you passed, you were given a government post. You were elevated to the ruling class. In the traditional Confucian social hierarchy, the scholar official was at the very top. Below them were the farmers who produced food. Below them were the artisans, those who make goods, and at the very bottom were the merchants. So even though modern Asia has fully embraced hyper capitalism, this cultural DNA is still deeply embedded in the collective psyche. And in the Asian psyche, Harvard is the school of the scholar official. For an Asian parent, getting a child into Harvard is the closest modern equivalent to passing the imperial examination. It doesn't just mean your child will be rich. It means your family has achieved dynastic legitimacy. It proves that you belong to the global ruling class. And because this obsession runs so deep, it has fundamentally altered the way Asian children are raised, sparking a multibillion dollar industry of extreme parenting and tutoring, intense admissions consulting, and cultural phenomena that, quite frankly, the Western world might find it hard to understand.
In South Korea, this obsession was even being broadcast directly into living rooms. In 2004, the massive hit K-drama, "Love Story in Harvard," aired, which was the show about the intense, glamorous lives of Harvard law and medical students, wrapping the university in romance and prestige. It successfully linked the Harvard brand to the explosive power of the Korean culture wave. Harvard wasn't just for politicians anymore. It was romantic, dramatic, and it was the absolute peak of the societal hierarchy. But as you're about to see, this desperate, single-minded pursuit of the Harvard brand has created a unique set of devastating consequences for Asian students, particularly when they actually submit their applications and come face to face with Harvard's controversial admission criteria.
So what does it take to get into Harvard? Let's take a look. Harvard, just like any other college in the US, rates every applicant on several scales, including academic, extracurricular, athletic, and personal. For the academic portion, they look at your grade point average or GPA and your SAT score. To have a realistic shot at getting in, most admitted students score in roughly the top 1% of test takers, with SAT scores typically in the 1,500 plus range out of 1,600, and many landing around 1,540. In terms of GPA, you're generally looking at near perfect grades, basically straight A's, in the most challenging courses your school offers, often translating to an unweighted GPA close to 4.0 on a 4.0 scale. Harvard actually grades your academics on an internal scale of 1-6, with one being the absolute best. A score of one means you're being evaluated as a truly exceptional academic talent, the kind of student who could graduate at the very top of the class. So a student with a 4.0 GPA and a 1580 SAT score looks like a one on paper and should be a strong contender for admission. But in reality, even numbers like that don't guarantee you a spot because of everything else Harvard is judging.
After the academic portion comes the extracurricular rating. Being well-rounded by playing an instrument and doing some volunteering isn't apparently enough anymore to get accepted into Harvard. Harvard looks for a spike, meaning you've achieved national or even international recognition in a very specific, highly focused field. For example, that could mean representing your country at the International Math Olympiad, publishing original scientific research in a real journal as a high school student, or performing as a soloist with a major orchestra. Those kinds of achievements would typically be evaluated as a top-tier extracurricular profile, the kind that makes you stand out from tens of thousands of other applicants. Then there's the athletic rating, and yes, really. Despite its nerdy, intellectual reputation, Harvard actually fields 42 Division I sports teams, which is more than almost any other college in the country. If you are a recruited athlete, your chances of admission skyrocket compared to a regular applicant. Now, that doesn't mean every applicant is expected to be a star athlete. For most students, sports are just one more activity that shows commitment or leadership and might modestly strengthen their overall profile. Not a requirement. Either you are a recruited athlete with exceptional sports talent, or you stand out in other ways, like academics, research, arts, or leadership.
Okay, so far, I think you'd agree that all the criteria I've just mentioned, academic, extracurricular, athlete, sounds like objective proof of metrics, right? We are dealing with hard numbers here. Either you scored a 1580 on your SAT or you didn't. Either you won a championship or you didn't. But then you get to the personal rating, which is the final and highly subjective score evaluating traits like likability, courage, kindness, and leadership. This is where things get messy. And yes, this is exactly where your essays, teacher recommendations, and interview come into play. To understand why this personal score even exists in the first place, we did a little digging and found something interesting about Harvard's past. Let's rewind to the 1920s. Back then, admissions were almost purely academic, based on school records and rigorous college entrance exams. Because of this, Jewish students, many of them children of recent immigrants from urban public schools, were dominating the entrance exams. By the early 1920s, Jewish students made up around 21 to 22% of Harvard's student body, even though Jews were only about 3% of the US population. Harvard's President at the time, Abbott Lawrence Lowell panicked. He openly complained that the anti-Semitic feeling among the students is increasing as the number of Jewish students grew and argued that to save the school, they needed to cap Jewish enrollment at 15%. But you just cannot ban people based on their religion on paper. So Lowell changed the rules of the game. Harvard shifted its admissions process away from pure academic testing and moved to a new holistic system that added a highly subjective metric, character. Suddenly, it wasn't just about how smart you were, it was about whether you supposedly had the right personality. Using this vague character test and other soft factors, Harvard was able to enforce an informal Jewish quota without ever writing "Jews Not Allowed" in the rule book. Kinda sounds familiar to what's happening today for Asian students, right?
Anyway, a decade later, in 1933, the next Harvard President, James Bryant Conant, tried to fix this. He adapted a new, standardized, multiple-choice test called the SAT. The SAT itself had been created by a Princeton psychologist named Carl Brigham, who adapted IQ-style tests, first used on US Army recruits in World War I into a college entrance exam. Conant's idea was to use this test to find hidden geniuses across the country, regardless of their background, and to push admissions closer to what he saw as a true meritocracy. But fast forward to today, and that exact tension between objective merit, the SAT, and subjective evaluation of character and personality has exploded into the biggest college admissions scandal in American history. And this time, Asian students have become the target.
In 2014, a group called Students for Fair Admissions sued Harvard, claiming that the university was using an illegal quota system to cap Asian-American enrollment. The lawsuit forced Harvard to open its highly secretive admissions vaults, and the data that came out was absolutely mind-blowing. The data showed that Asian Americans scored higher than any other racial groups on the academic and extracurricular metrics. They had the highest SAT scores, the best grades, and the most impressive resumes. Yet their actual admission rates were suspiciously low. Why? Because of the personal rating. According to the court documents, Harvard's admissions officers consistently gave Asian-American applicants the lowest scores of any racial groups on positive personality traits like likability, courage, and being widely respected. Here's where it gets crazy. The alumni interviewers, the actual Harvard graduates who sat down and had face-to-face conversations with these Asian-American applicants, gave them personal ratings that were perfectly comparable to white applicants. But the admissions staff sitting in an office in Cambridge who had never even met these students, systematically downgraded their personalities just by looking at their files. Internal documents and testimony from the Harvard case show that Asian applicants were often described in stereotype terms like they are academically strong but bland, or lacking in leadership or charisma, even though their interview scores didn't back that up.
Now, just to play the devil's advocate, let's say there could be some cultural disconnect at play here because East Asian cultures condition children to value humility, harmony, and restraint. At the same time, the American, and especially Ivy League, idea of leadership often leans towards being outspoken, confident, and visibly assertive. Harvard's own personal rating explicitly looks at things like likability, humor, grit, leadership, courage, and whether someone seems like an attractive person to be with. So when an Asian student writes a very modest essay or behaves respectfully quiet in an interview, it can hurt their ability to project the easy, relaxed confidence, a casual charisma that admissions officers are trained to reward. A typical Western admissions officer might not read that behavior as respect. They may just see a lack of leadership or personality. But still, the fact that they artificially downgraded the ratings without even meeting them in person speaks volumes.
Okay, so who was taking the place of rejected Asian-American students? Other minority students, black and Hispanic students were often admitted with significantly lower average SAT scores on the order of 50 to 60 points lower per section than Asian-American applicants, but with much higher personality ratings. Therein lies the problem, because how do you even measure someone's personality or leadership potential objectively, especially across different racial groups? In the end, this kind of scoring easily slides into racial stereotyping and profiling, dressed up as holistic judgment. That's why in 2023, the US Supreme Court ruled that Harvard's Race Conscious Admission System violated the US Constitution and effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions nationwide. Harvard wasn't fined, and no individual Asian students were ordered to be admitted, but the court forced Harvard and other elite schools to scrap their policies and rebuild their admissions systems without explicitly using race.
In the very first class admitted after the ruling, the demographic shifts were noticeable. For Harvard's class of 2028, Asian-American enrollment jumped to 37%. But in case you're thinking, Wow, this is great. Now it's all about true meritocracy. Not so fast. The Harvard lawsuit also revealed that over 43% of white students admitted to Harvard fall into the so-called ALDC categories. ALDC stands for Recruited Athletes, Legacies, those on the Dean's Interest List, essentially a VIP list for applicants connected to major donors, and children of faculty and staff. Between 2014 and 2019, students on this list had an admission rate of over 42%, roughly nine times higher than the overall admit rate. Then there are legacy admits, the children of the global elite, families who have spent millions over generations to maintain their dynastic ties to the university. Statistical analysis showed that if white ALDC students were treated like normal applicants without their special status, roughly 75% of them would have been rejected. Your family's last name and bank account size provide a monumental boost that largely bypasses the supposedly meritocratic SAT system. We don't yet have clear public data on how ALDC admission rates have changed after the Supreme Court ruling, but the underlying structure of preference still appears to be intact. Meaning, Asian-American students and other non-ALDC applicants are effectively competing for the leftover spots after athletes, legacies, donor-connected applicants, and faculty kids are taken care of.
On top of that, in both his first and second terms, the Trump administration has launched aggressive crackdowns on foreign student visas, especially for Chinese nationals seen as having ties to the Chinese Communist Party or sensitive research areas. In theory, this could benefit domestic Asian applicants because they're the ones who have been squeezed from the top by wealthy ALDC admits, squeezed from the side by race-based diversity targets, and forced to compete against the absolute wealthiest, the most hyper-engineered international applicants from mainland China.
So in the end, what does all this actually mean? Yes, Harvard is still the dream school that everybody, Asian-Americans and international students alike, wants to get into. And honestly, you can't blame them. I mean, who wouldn't want access to one of the most powerful global networks on the planet, especially when that network includes political power and influence? But increasingly, we're entering an age of AI and a fourth industrial revolution, where having Harvard on your resume doesn't automatically guarantee you a job anymore. The jobs themselves are disappearing. Entire industries are being rewritten. And if the so-called leaders Harvard is producing are still mostly marching into the same old tracks, I'm talking about law, finance, medicine, politics, just like they did 20 years ago, then you have to ask, is the Harvard brand really worth sacrificing your family's money, time, and mental health for? Because if Harvard became the modern imperial cord, what happens when the structure of power itself changes? Food for thought.
That being said, the impression I got from talking to a number of current Harvard students was that they all had a very distinctive sense of purpose, a vision that probably would have made them successful even without the word Harvard on their resume. In fact, Harvard wasn't even the first choice for many of them, and they certainly weren't the type to pay an admissions consultant to churn out some fake formula-based essay just to look like Harvard material, which makes you wonder whether Harvard selects future leaders or simply identifies the ones who are going to lead anyway. So maybe the real flex in 2026 isn't getting into Harvard. Maybe it's knowing exactly who you are, what you want to build, and actually building it with or without Harvard's name attached.
If you found this video insightful and felt like you learned something new, be sure to subscribe to Asian Boss and share this video with your family and friends. For some reason, we've been getting a lot of positive feedback lately on how thorough our research is and how engaging long-form explainers are, and it's very humbling and gratifying at the same time. What we also get asked a lot is, how do we choose all these interesting topics? Good question. The first thing we do is not rely on AI for topic generation because it can only suggest mainstream topics based on the data it has scraped. I just try to ask questions and talk to locals as much as I can. It's not exactly rocket science, but it does require curiosity and critical thinking. And sometimes, it's just a matter of asking, "Hey, what's happening in your country?" The difference here is that I don't pretend I'm the expert. I just try my best to understand the topic and explain it as clearly as I can. In the process, I want to include your perspective and input as much as possible. So if you like to get your voice heard, there's a way. We are now inviting a small number of people to participate in our future live streams where we can brainstorm Asia-related topics and fact-check together. This is a true grassroots media approach I dreamt of when I started Asian Boss to fight against the mainstream legacy media narratives about Asia. And I think we're slowly getting there. So if you're based in Asia, you feel comfortable showing your face and speaking English, and you have interesting personal experiences or topic suggestions to share with a global audience about what's happening in Asia, you should apply. Just fill out the form in the description and submit a short video introduction of yourself. Speak directly to the camera in a selfie mode like this and keep it simple. Tell us who you are and why you think your perspective would add value to this conversation. I'll personally review every submission. The goal here is to form a real community of culturally curious people and future leaders that powers our content, which is why we'll be experimenting with this new livestream format. Hope that makes sense. Of course, I'm Stephen Park. Thank you for watching all the way till the end. And as always, stay curious.