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Amherst College
Amherst College, founded in 1821, has long been considered Williams College's closest rival for the title of best liberal arts college in the country, and the two schools' athletic rivalry, dating to an 1859 baseball game believed to be the first intercollegiate game ever played, is the oldest continuous college sports rivalry in the United States. The college's open curriculum, which imposes no distribution requirements beyond a single required first-year seminar, gives Amherst students more freedom to design their own academic path than almost any other selective liberal arts college, a distinctive approach the school has maintained for decades. Amherst was among the earliest highly selective liberal arts colleges to adopt need-blind admission for both domestic and international applicants, and its socioeconomic diversity relative to peer institutions is frequently cited by higher-education researchers as a model other elite colleges have since tried to replicate. The college's small size, fewer than 2,000 students, and its central Massachusetts location within the Five College Consortium — alongside Smith, Mount Holyoke, Hampshire, and UMass Amherst — give students access to a much broader range of courses and social life than the college's own enrollment alone would suggest.
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Harvard University
Harvard University was founded in 1636, making it the oldest institution of higher education in the United States, chartered more than a century before the country itself existed and named after its first benefactor, clergyman John Harvard, who left the fledgling college his library and half his estate upon his death in 1638. Harvard's endowment, the largest of any university in the world at more than $50 billion, funds financial aid, research, and faculty recruiting at a scale no other academic institution can match, and its law, business, and medical schools are each consistently ranked among the very best in their respective fields. The university has produced more United States presidents than any other institution and has more Nobel laureates affiliated with it than almost any other university in the world, a combination of political and scientific influence that's made "Harvard" itself a shorthand, well beyond academia, for elite achievement. Harvard's extreme selectivity, admitting a small fraction of an application pool that regularly exceeds 50,000 students, combined with its historical depth and financial resources, is why it remains the university most people name first when asked to identify the single most prestigious school in the country.
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