<p>Columbia, Penn, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth. So, every Ivy except HYP has ED.</p>
<p>Elsewhere in the top 15: Duke, Northwestern, WUSTL, Johns Hopkins</p>
<p>Columbia freshman here. I was waitlisted at Stanford this year, and would have surely gone had they taken me off (I’m a CS major, hence my bias towards Stanford). Nonetheless, Columbia’s a fantastic school which has garnered nothing but awe when mentioned - amongst both laymen and academics. I don’t feel like I’m losing out on many opportunities at Columbia compared to Stanford. If anything, I have way too much to do. The classes are well-taught, the workload is intense, the opportunities outside class are overwhelming. Though a few doors may have closed from not being in SV, many more doors have opened from being in NYC. NYC has a massive startup presence, second only to Silicon Valley. Startups and large companies like Microsoft, Google have events often. Banking representatives basically live on campus - Goldman, JP Morgan, Blackrock recruit heavily.</p>
<p>There are lots of incredibly smart people at Columbia, and even more incredibly dumb people (but I realize that the latter is common amongst all top universities - I’ve met plenty of imbeciles from Yale and MIT. It’s more of me being disappointed with the average American education coming from Asia).</p>
<p>All in all, Stanford and Columbia are peer schools in my view, with the edge given to Stanford. Stanford isn’t leagues ahead of Columbia, hopelessly outclassing it as some extremists have said on this forum, nor is Columbia a much better school than Stanford like the other Columbia students have told you. I’ve given you a qualitative argument. I can pull up statistics (which are often incorrect) to prove one is better than the other. Take what you want from this.</p>
<p>I know this is an old thread, but in case anyone reads this I thought I’d point out that when the USN&WR report rankings were first issued they were based solely on peer rankings. Under this methodology Stanford was consistently ranked #1 (sometimes tied with Harvard). And Stanford is still at the top if you look strictly at peer rankings.</p>
<p>Over the years USN&WR has repeatedly tweaked the rankings methodology by adding and adjusting purportedly objective factors like retention rates, alumni giving, admission rates, SAT scores, etc. However, all that did is substitute the editor’s view of what factors might be important in measuring prestige for that of the peer institutions. That’s why you get anomalies where schools seem to be ranking higher (or lower) than their historical prestige might indicate. It’s like the difference between the AP poll and BCS poll in college football. Adding all those computer rankings doesn’t make the ranking any more accurate because each of those computer rankings reflects a particular person’s view of what factors should be taken into account in measuring the quality of a football program. In the end, it’s really just the equivalent of one more vote.</p>
<p>That said, being informed of the objective figures could be helpful to some consumers. For example, average SAT scores may be really important to some. To others it may be job or graduate school placement success. In the end, all these schools are very prestigious as well as very difficult to get into. The decision of which one to attend will ultimately be personal to the student and his or her family.</p>