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Comment by littletimmy | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't "do" anything right. It just happens to be the oldest university in the US therefore very prestigious therefore being absurdly wealthy (like Oxford/Cambridge in UK) therefore being able to recruit the best talent thereforee being very prestigious.... and on goes the cycle.

In general, it is futile asking what extremely successful outliers "do" right. Even if they wilfully did do something right (which they don't), it would not be replicable.

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Not really; as Wikipedia accurately puts it in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_William_Eliot

Charles William Eliot (March 20, 1834 – August 22, 1926) was an American academic who was selected as Harvard's president in 1869. He transformed the provincial college into the preeminent American research university.

The article goes into a lot of detail about the transformation.

    It doesn't "do" anything right. It just happens to
    be the oldest university in the US therefore very
    prestigious

That can't be all of it, because other similarly old ones are nowhere near as prestigious. For example the College of William and Mary is 1693 and St. John’s College is 1696, which puts them older than Yale or Princeton, but far fewer people have heard of them.

    In general, it is futile asking what extremely successful
    outliers "do" right ... it would not be replicable.

Hanson isn't trying to replicate their success (found a top-tier university), he's trying to understand it.

Yes, it's interesting to hypothesise what the younger schools that do break into the top rankings are doing right. E.g., Stanford, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon in the U.S.. It seems to be a combination of heavy private investment, recruitment of name brand faculty, and structuring of internal incentives to be a competitive (grant-winning) institution.

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