Harvard is one of the world's most prestigious universities and has the largest endowment of any academic institution in the world ($22.6 billion as of 2004, nearly double that of Yale University, the institution with the second-largest endowment). The 2005 US News "National University" rankings placed Harvard and Princeton in joint first place [1] . Harvard was also first in 2004, following five years of second and third place rankings. The 2004 Times Higher Education Supplement World University Rankings placed Harvard University in sole first place [2] .

A faculty of about 2,300 professors serves about 6,650 undergraduate and 13,000 graduate students. Admission to Harvard is extremely competitive, and its overall undergraduate acceptance rate for 2004 was 10.3%. According to The Atlantic Monthly, it is the fifth most selective college in the United States (after MIT, Princeton, Caltech, and Yale).

Harvard recently returned from an unrestricted Early Action policy (where students can apply "early" to Harvard in addition to other schools) to a single-choice nonbinding Early Action policy (where you can apply "early" only to a single school), aligning it with the policies of Yale and Stanford, which had both recently moved from a binding single-choice Early Decision policy.

The school color is a shade richer than red but brighter than burgundy, referred to as crimson, which is also the name of the Harvard sports teams and the daily newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. The color was unofficially adopted (in preference to magenta) by an 1875 vote of the student body, although the association with some form of red can be traced back to 1858, when Charles William Eliot, a young graduate student who would later become Harvard's president, bought red bandanas for his crew so they could more easily be distinguished by spectators at a regatta.

Harvard today has nine faculties, listed below in chronological order of foundation:

• The Faculty of Arts and Sciences and its subfaculty, the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which together serve:
  • Harvard College, the University's undergraduate portion (1636)
  • The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (organized 1872)
  • The Harvard Division of Continuing Education, including Harvard Extension School and Harvard Summer School
• The Faculty of Medicine, including the Medical School (1782) and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine (1867, the first U.S. dental school).
• Harvard Divinity School (1816)
• Harvard Law School (1817)
• Harvard Business School (1908)
• The Graduate School of Design (1914)
• The Graduate School of Education (1920)
• The School of Public Health (1922)
• The John F. Kennedy School of Government (1936)

In 1999, the remnants of Radcliffe College were reorganized as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

The Harvard University Library System, centered on Widener Library, with over 90 individual libraries and over 14.5 million volumes, is the largest university library system in the world and, after the Library of Congress, the second-largest library system in the United States. Harvard also has several important art museums, including the Fogg Museum of Art (with galleries featuring history of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, with particular strengths in Italian early Renaissance, British pre-Raphaelite, and 19th-century French art); the Busch-Reisinger Museum (central and northern European art); the Sackler Museum (ancient, Asian, Islamic and later Indian art); the Museum of Natural History, which contains the famous glass flowers exhibit; the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology; and the Semitic Museum.

Prominent student organizations at Harvard include the aforementioned Crimson; the Harvard Lampoon, a humor magazine; the Harvard Advocate, one of the nation's oldest literary magazines; and the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, which produces an annual burlesque and celebrates notable actors at its Man of the Year and Woman of the Year ceremonies; and the Harvard Glee Club, the oldest and one of the most prestigious college choruses in America. The Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, composed mainly of undergraduates, was founded in 1808 as the Pierian Sodality and has been performing as a symphony orchestra since the 1950s. Let's Go Travel Guides, a leading travel guide series and a division of Harvard Student Agencies , is run solely by Harvard students who research and edit improved versions of the books every summer. Harvard student organizations run the gamut, from publications, to political clubs, ethnic and religious associations, special interests, community service, and so on.

The radio station WHRB (95.3FM Cambridge), is run exclusively by Harvard students, and is given space on the Harvard campus in the basement of Pennypacker Hall, a freshman dormitory. Known throughout the Boston metropolitan area for its top-notch classical, jazz, underground rock and blues programming, WHRB is also home of the notorious radio "Orgy" format, where the entire catalog of a certain band, record, or artist is played in sequence.

Harvard's principal athletic rival is Yale University, including the nation's oldest football rivalry, dating back to 1875. While the Harvard football team was one of the best in the beginning days of the sport, today Harvard fields top teams in ice hockey, crew, and squash. As of 2003, there were 43 Division I intercollegiate varsity sports teams for women and men at Harvard, more than at any other college in the country.

Harvard College has traditionally taken many of its students from private American preparatory schools such as Phillips Exeter Academy, the Lawrenceville School, Groton School, St. Paul's School, Milton Academy, and Phillips Andover Academy, though today most undergraduates come from public schools across the United States and around the globe. Harvard has traditionally had close ties to Boston Latin School, the oldest public school in the United States, founded in 1635. Early incoming Harvard classes were predominantly from Boston Latin; still today over a dozen students each year matriculate to Harvard from this inner-city magnet school.

Harvard contains many strong departments that are ranked among the best in the world. Some lesser known departments also have significant global influence. For example, the Department of African and African-American Studies is widely recognized as the foremost in the world, notwithstanding the recent departure of Cornel West for Princeton University. Another example is Harvard's Judaic Studies Department, which was headed by Professor Harry Austryn Wolfson. Harvard boasts a unique $5 million Judaica library which has identified and categorized books by ink type, font type, paper thickness, pagination style, binding method and numerous other categorizations.

Harvard has a friendly rivalry with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which dates back to 1900, when a merger of the two schools was frequently mooted and at one point officially agreed upon (ultimately cancelled by Massachusetts courts). Today, the two schools cooperate as much as they compete, with many joint conferences and programs, including the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology  and the Harvard-MIT Data Center . In addition, students at the two schools can cross-register (i.e., Harvard students can register for courses offered at MIT, and vice versa) without any additional fees, for credits toward their own school's degrees. The city of Cambridge is notable for the presence of two major research universities within two miles (3.2 km) of each other. A third major research university, Boston University, is located between Harvard and MIT on the Boston side of the Charles River. These three schools jointly participate in many programs, such as the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology  hosted at MIT.

Famous Harvard alumni include seven U.S. Presidents (John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and George W. Bush), philosopher Henry David Thoreau, comedian Conan O'Brien, and actor Tommy Lee Jones. See also: List of Harvard University people.

Harvard is known for its liberal left-wing politics. Richard Nixon famously called it the "Kremlin on the Charles" (note that the city in which Harvard is located is sometimes called the "People's Republic of Cambridge").

Though Harvard has been featured in many films, including Legally Blonde, The Firm, Good Will Hunting, With Honors, and Harvard Man, the University has not allowed any movies to be filmed on its campus since Love Story in the 1960s. Many movies have characters identified as Harvard graduates, including A Few Good Men, American Psycho, and Two Weeks Notice.