III. Compare the educational system in Great Britain and in the United States of America. Harvard university

Harvard University is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States (founded in September 8, 1636) and one of the nation’s most prestigious. It is one of the Ivy League schools. The main university campus lies along the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a few miles west of downtown Boston. Harvard’s total enrolment is about 20,000.

Harvard’s history began when a college was established at New Towne, which was later renamed Cambridge for the English alma mater of some of the leading colonists. Classes began in the summer of 1638 with one master in a single frame house and a “college yard.” Harvard was named for a Puritan minister, John Harvard, who left the college his books and half of his estate.

At its inception Harvard was under church sponsorship, although it was not formally affiliated with any religious body. During its first two centuries the college was gradually liberated, first from clerical and later from political control, until in 1865 the university alumni began electing members of the governing board. During his long tenure as Harvard’s president (1869–1909), Charles W. Eliot made Harvard into an institution with national influence.

The alumni and faculty of Harvard have been closely associated with many areas of American intellectual and political development. By the end of the 20th century, Harvard had educated six U.S. presidents—John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy—and a number of justices, cabinet officers, and congressional leaders. Literary figures among Harvard graduates include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry David Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, Henry James, Henry Adams, T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Walter Lippmann, and Norman Mailer. Other notable intellectual figures who graduated from or taught at Harvard include the historians Francis Parkman, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Samuel Eliot Morison; the astronomer Benjamin Peirce; the chemist Wolcott Gibbs; and the naturalist Louis Agassiz. William James introduced the experimental study of psychology into the United States at Harvard in the 1870s. Its faculties have produced more than 30 Nobel laureates.

Harvard’s undergraduate school, Harvard College, contains about one-third of the total student body. The core of the university’s teaching staff consists of the faculty of arts and sciences, which includes the graduate faculty of arts and sciences. The university has graduate or professional schools of medicine, law, business, divinity, education, government, dental medicine, design, and public health. The schools of law, medicine, and business are particularly prestigious. Among the advanced research institutions affiliated with Harvard are the Museum of Comparative Zoology (founded in 1859 by Agassiz), the Gray Herbarium, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, the Arnold Arboretum, and the Fog Art Museum. Also associated with the university are an astronomical observatory in Harvard, Massachusetts; the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C., a centre for Byzantine and pre-Columbian studies; and the Harvard-Yenching Institute in Cambridge for research on East and Southeast Asia. The Harvard University Library is one of the largest and most important university libraries in the world.

The university comprises eleven separate academic units—ten faculties and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study—with campuses throughout the Boston metropolitan area. Harvard's 210-acre (85 ha) main campus is centred on Harvard Yard in Cambridge, approximately 3.4 miles (5.5 km) northwest of downtown Boston. The business school and athletics facilities, including Harvard Stadium, are located across the Charles River in Allston and the medical, dental, and public health schools are located in the Longwood Medical Area.

Harvard has the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world, standing at $32 billion as of September 2011.