<p>"Lots of you don't want to go there." That is promoting one school over another if I ever saw it on a board on CC, Alumother.</p>
<p>Inuendo - um, excuse me? Kids who read this board I assume want to go to Princeton. Lots of kids who want to go Princeton in my experience don't want to go to Harvard. That is actually just an observation. I don't know why they feel that way, except of course for my daughter, but they do. Doesn't mean one thing in particular about the schools. My goal is just to let kids who have an opinion follow their hearts.</p>
<p>I'm confused. I thought she applied SCEA to Harvard, but that her "secret favorite" may have been Columbia.</p>
<p>You are incorrect to assume that "kids who read this bored ... want to go to Princeton," since there are plenty who post or lurk for other reasons. </p>
<p>Also your statement "Lots of kids who want to go to Princeton in my experience don't want to go to Harvard," is based purely on anecdotal evidence. Princeton shares a significant number of cross-admits with Harvard and there are even more students who apply to both and get into one or none at all. This suggests that there are, in fact, a substantial number of students who are interested both Harvard and Princeton. </p>
<p>If your "goal is just to let kids who have an opinion follow their hearts," then maybe you should keep your own, highly polarised opinion off these boards, since you were clearly promoting one university over the other.</p>
<p>Give me a break. What utopia are you living in if you think Byerly doesn't favor one school over the other. At least Alumother favors and comments on Princeton on the PRINCETON board. I know it is a very difficult concept for you ivy league alums to comprehend. As a member of the Class of 2010, I find Alumother's posts incredibly helpful, while Byerly's are simply a nusance.</p>
<p>
[quote]
"Princeton shares a significant number of cross-admits with Harvard" (inuendo)
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Any precise idea, how many? Byerly who claimed to have some secret knowledge from the H side, hinted at > 100.</p>
<p>A user on this board gives some raw figures, however, I am not certain of their accuracy:</p>
<p>inuendo, there is one gaping hole in your argument:</p>
<p>Early Decision.</p>
<p>Obviously those kids that apply ED dont want to go to Harvard. Moreover, most of the kids that "lurk" on this board applied to Princeton. Look at the stats roster. That means that it is indeed a board where kids post and read to find out about....Princeton.</p>
<p>Guys,</p>
<p>I went to college in the 1970's. I was a raw high school girl from Northern California with hippie roots and yet I was treated as though my ideas mattered from the moment I walked onto the Princeton campus. I had some of the most profound moments of intellectual intoxication of my life sitting in my dorm room on the 3rd floor of Brown Hall. I met cute guys. I met people from backgrounds I could not have even imagined. </p>
<p>After I graduated, my Princeton degree got me jobs over and over again. When I stayed home with my children for several years, my Princeton degree helped get me back into the work force and allowed me to enter at a high enough level that I suffered very few career penalties from my mommy time.</p>
<p>So I have loyalty. I love the place. And I'm not a rah-rah type. I never called it Tigertown, I don't care who wins the football games. But Princeton taught me a lot, about how my mind works, how the world works, about how to make my way. So I have loyalty. You can call it bias if you want.</p>
<p>I will not go over to the Harvard board to profess my loyalty for Princeton. What on earth would be the point? The point is to be a resource for the class of 2010 interested in Princeton - if they want it.</p>
<p>good post......if all a college teaches you is to have a binary logic, you will waste money no matter where you go.</p>
<p>Life is more than t-shirts, class rings or 8.5 x 11 - $200,000 piece of paper.</p>
<p>Alumother is in fact correct. Your degree from Princeton will land you so many jobs.</p>
<p>It's one reason why I'm considering Princeton for premed rather than UF. I think UF has a pass rate of 40%, while Princeton has it somewhere in the 90%. Also, at UF, I've talked to people and they say "you are a small fish in a big pond."</p>
<p>It seems at Princeton EVERYONE is interested in your completely crazy idea because you never know if you are going to be the next Bill Gates. </p>
<p>I'm going to be chillin' in Princeton, NJ tomorrow. I can't wait. :D I'm packing now!</p>
<p>To amnesia: Unfortunately, Princeton does not have a premed program (or any other preprofessional degree program for that matter).</p>
<p>However, this fact will not necessarily hinder you when you apply to med-school, and I still encourage you to apply there. :D</p>
<p>Playfair, did those figures give you an idea of the size of Harvard and Princeton's cross-admit pool?</p>
<p>So does anyone else have any relevant information for rising seniors thinking about applying to Princeton? Seems like this thread got wayyy off topic and I would love some advice before I start the whole app process. =) Alumother, your advice is great!</p>
<p>If you really really want Princeton, than make sure to APPLY EARLY and use their application-not the common app.</p>
<p>In regards to Alumother's original post, her facts about money are largely irrelevant. Stanford is more aggressively building (as evidenced by the massive new construction around campus) and is consistently raising more money than Princeton. Alumni networks are irrelevant if they don't get you jobs in the "new economy," which Stanford does more than any other school. Money does not measure an experience--as evidenced by Brown's low admit rate (14.5%) and high number of applications. Brown's endowment is the smallest out of the Ivy League. </p>
<p>Byerly has every right to convincingly state that no matter how great Princeton is, Harvard regularly destroys it by a 75-25 margin (or more) in cross-admits. Stanford, moreover, has a higher RD matriculation rate.</p>
<p>In regards to Byerly's use of WSJ "Feeder School rankings," they are quite biased:
"We focused on 15 elite schools, five each from medicine, law and business, to serve as our benchmark for profiling where the students came from. Opinions vary, of course, but our list reflects a consensus of grad-school deans we interviewed, top recruiters and published grad-school rankings (including the Journal's own MBA rankings). So for medicine, our schools were Columbia; Harvard; Johns Hopkins; the University of California, San Francisco; and Yale, while our MBA programs were Chicago; Dartmouth's Tuck School; Harvard; MIT's Sloan School; and Penn's Wharton School. In law, we looked at Chicago; Columbia; Harvard; Michigan; and Yale."</p>
<p>By not including Stanford Law or Stanford Business, both recognized by almost everyone to be top-five if not top-three (Wharton, Harvard are better in business, and Harvard and Yale for law), it makes Stanford look significantly worse than HYP, whereas in reality it isn't.</p>
<p>zephyr, </p>
<p>In fact I am intimately acquainted with fundraising at Stanford so I cannot answer you as it is confidential information.</p>
<p>My facts about money are wholly accurate and highly relevant. More money per student is more money per student.</p>
<p>And you want to talk new economy?</p>
<p>Here's my story. I was a Comp Lit major. Now I am a VP of Marketing for a high tech company. I spend my days with software programmers, both in Silicon Valley and in China. There isn't a much newer economy than Shanghai. </p>
<p>I would be happy to discuss the new economy, the degree to which PHP will or will not make headway in a world dominated by JSPs, and the merits of mySQL and the Open Source model. Or we can stay focused on whether Princeton provides a great undergraduate education. And help kids out who want to apply early.</p>
<p>BTW, I completely agree that Stanford puts a lot of people here in the valley. After all, once you go to school in Northern Ca who would want to leave:). VCs in particular. But there is no bias against Princeton - the opposite. Same is true for HYM. </p>
<p>When I got my first high tech job the admin for my VP walked me in to his office and said, "This is Alumother. She has really good schools."</p>
<p>Advice for rising seniors applying early. Include all relevant materials. Start your essay in a few weeks. Live with the application for a while. Make sure your real self comes through. They aren't looking for a bunch of mini-adults in my experience.</p>
<p>I have no deep knowledge of the admissions office, only my daughter's experience where her Princeton app included a CD with her dancing and a very personal essay. So that's my advice, take it as just another anecdote, not quantitative tested steps - OK? I want to help you guys but you have to see my advice in the right context. Your mom may know more than I do:).</p>
<p>Throwing out technology jargon doesn't faze me, Alumother. While a probably polisci/econ double major, I follow along ideas & trends in the tech field closely. I never said there was a bias against HYPM, but only that Stanford seemed to be better situated and the education more focused on the "new economy" (although there is great academic debate over whether it actually exists...). </p>
<p>Trust me, I respect Princeton very much, although the atmosphere wasn't really my thing, so I didn't apply. But most would agree with me that simply declaring Princeton as the "best undergraduate education" and "most supported by alumni" is facetious. Princeton was well down the list in the current alumni giving totals, as a previous poster showed.</p>
<p>It's not jargon. It's technology. That's what technology sounds like when you sit in an office with programmers and software architects. And I'm not trying to phase you, just show your arguments to be what they are. The arguments of a young intelligent person who doesn't yet have much experience. I hope you have a wonderful time at Stanford. You are lucky to be attending. As many know, my father taught there for years, my daughter almost chose it for her next four years.</p>
<p>And the money I speak of is per capita. Per capita.</p>