Which is better for undergraduate teaching: Notre Dame or Harvard?

The biggest practical tradeoff is this: Harvard usually offers more academic breadth and research access, while Notre Dame is more consistently built around undergraduates in day-to-day teaching and campus culture. Notre Dame is widely known for putting heavy emphasis on undergraduate instruction, residential life, and faculty engagement with undergrads. Harvard absolutely has excellent teaching in many departments, but it is also a major research university where graduate programs and faculty research can play a bigger role in the academic environment.

If your question is specifically about how much the institution centers undergrads in the classroom, Notre Dame often has the edge. Its reputation for undergraduate teaching is not just about small classes in the first year, but about a campus culture where undergrads are the main focus and professor accessibility is taken seriously across much of the university.

At Harvard, the upside is range. You get extraordinary departments, world-class faculty, and a huge number of courses and intellectual opportunities. But the undergraduate experience can vary more by department and by how proactive you are. In some areas, especially intro courses, interaction may run more through teaching fellows or larger lecture formats before you get to more personal access.

So on the narrow question of undergraduate teaching, I would give Notre Dame the advantage. Harvard can deliver an amazing undergraduate education, and in some fields it may feel unmatched because of its resources, but Notre Dame is more consistently oriented around undergraduates as the center of the academic experience.