For just the second time in 76 years, Harvard University undergraduates failed to win a Rhodes Scholarship, while the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., led the nation with four winners, including a 23-year-old pilot who grew up on the Upper East Side.

That Harvard was not among this year’s batch of 32 recipients of the preeminent scholarship for Americans came as a surprise to a school accustomed to churning out five or six winners at one time. The disappointment was even sharper because Harvard had produced the highest number, 17, of the 99 finalists.

Harvard did top its rival, Yale University, on the gridiron in “The Game” over the weekend, but Yale led the Ivy League with three scholarship winners. One, senior Nathan Herring, 22, was a defensive end on the football team before being injured. He also authored and illustrated a children’s picture book, “How Mouse Got His House,” and has maintained a perfect grade point average.

Duke University and the University of Chicago also each had three recipients.

Still, Harvard’s Web site yesterday sounded a triumphant note. It prominently noted that one of the recipients, William Kelly, is a master’s student at the Kennedy School of Government, having graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy earlier this year.

Mr. Kelly’s bid for the Rhodes was endorsed by the Naval Academy, not Harvard, and the Rhodes Trust will not add Mr. Kelly to Harvard’s tally of winners. The American secretary of the Rhodes Trust, Elliot Gerson, said Harvard has produced 313 winners since the scholarship was first awarded in 1904, while Harvard’s communications office put the number at 316. It was the second time in five years that Harvard was shut out of the Rhodes.

Mr. Gerson, who says he’s reluctant to compare the numbers of scholarships won by various institutions, cautioned against reading too much into Harvard’s rare exclusion, saying, “It’s an individual award. It has nothing to do with where someone went to college.”

Columbia University was shut out of the scholarship for a third year in a row. Columbia’s last winner was Kamyar Cyrus Habib, an English and comparative literature major and published photographer who is blind.

There have been 23 Rhodes Scholars from Columbia, four fewer than the number of winners from the University of Montana, whose location in a sparsely populated state put it at a distinct advantage over schools in more populated states in the early years of the award. The Rhodes Trust in 1930 leveled the playing field, allotting the award to regions of varying size rather than to states.

Columbia may still be at a disadvantage because its regional district encompasses New York alone. Its students compete not only against other schools in the state, like Cornell University, but against New York-based students at schools across the nation. There can be only two New York district winners a year.

Ensign Kelly, speaking to The New York Sun on a train en route to Harvard from Manhattan, said he plans to study international relations theory at Oxford University and will then head to Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla., to train to become a naval aviator. He was raised on the Upper East Side and attended Collegiate School for Boys on the Upper West Side, where John F. Kennedy Jr. went to high school.

Accompanied by his grandparents, who were aeronautical engineers, he started flying at 15 at MacArthur Airport in Islip, N.Y., in a single-engine Cessna aircraft. He earned his pilot’s license at 17 and joined the flying team at the Naval Academy, competing at the regional and national levels in such categories as precision flying and precision landing. A Truman scholar as well, he graduated with a 3.8 grade point average, with a major in international relations and a minor in French.

“The real people who deserve the attention are my classmates who are either deployed now or training to deploy,” he said. “They are the ones who are out there on the front lines keeping us safe. They’re the ones I think about when I wake up in the morning.”

New York City produced one other winner, Daniel Altschuler, a 2004 Amherst College graduate who majored in political science, black studies, and Spanish and led exchange trips to Cuba, according to biographical information supplied by the Rhodes Trust.

Another recipient, Scott Erwin, a graduate of the University of Richmond, survived four gunshot wounds while working for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. In June 2004, while driving with two Iraqi policemen and an Iraqi translator in an SUV outside the Green Zone, insurgents in another car ambushed his vehicle and sprayed it with automatic fire. The gunmen killed the policemen and shot him in his arms and stomach. A small battery in his ID pouch next to his heart deflected a bullet, he said, and probably saved his life. Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III awarded him the Defense of Freedom medal, the civilian equivalent of the Purple Heart.

The scholarship was created in 1902 by the will of British philanthropist Cecil Rhodes. This year’s 32 recipients heading to Oxford competed against 903 applicants from 333 colleges.