<p>^I’d like to be a part of that in college… </p>
<p>I probably won’t make it though. It sounds even more hard core than AMC/AIME/USAMO. :(</p>
<p>As a side note, it sounds like MIT pawns when it comes to math.</p>
<p>Yup Ravi Vakil 
he’s my hero, and I don’t even go to Stanford or care much about the Putnam.</p>
<p>“I was never saying anything to the contrary. I wholeheartedly agree. But I think it’s a bit far to say that HYPS are “inferior” to those other schools. The others are very possibly equal; but better? No.”</p>
<p>I disagree. In certain areas of study, there are many, many schools that are better than HYPS. For example, one would probably get a much better engineering education at Michigan, Illinois, Cal, Caltech, and at least a dozen other universities. (This example does not apply to Stanford.) And engineering is a pretty broad “field”, so this is very relevant. There are many other schools that are better than HYPS in different areas of study.</p>
<p>But unlike HYP, Stanford is top across the board–I can’t find any discipline that you could say is “weak” at Stanford, and thus you won’t get as good an education. There are very few schools that can make this claim (Berkeley, for example), and Stanford is definitely one of them.</p>