<p>ha, harvard junkie no. 1 - byerly - posts expressly or impliedly anti-princeton stuff in the princeton forum ALL THE TIME. just check his profile - you'll see that 10 of his 25 most recent posts were made in the P and Y fora.</p>
<p>I dont know many Princeton kids that come here to demean Harvard...most of us quietly like our school and stand by to defend it whenever its attacked. Except I noticed that the Princeton forum is attacked most commonly with comments degrading it (out of any other school forum...except maybe WUSTL), including Byerly (only hints at it and sometimes its funny but not always haha) and zephyr likes to tell us how much better stanford is at least once a day.</p>
<p>I have never ... EVER ... said anything negative or "demeaning" or "degrading" about Princeton academics. Anybody "implying" the contrary (like the Princeton Trolls f.scottie or Shrek) is not telling the truth.</p>
<p>The program is not "weak" at all; it is just very small. In the GRE score of entering students, the % of faculty belonging to the NSE, and research expenditures per capita, it is very near the top.</p>
<p>Present plans call for expanding the engineering program over 10 years to surpass Cornell and become the Ivies largest. They are not fooling around. A multi-billion dollar engineering campus will be built on land recently acquired across the Charles River in Boston.</p>
<p>Does that make me a Stanford troll, Byerly? I'm quite curious to know. </p>
<p>The Ivies' largest engineering program will still be far, far behind Stanford. The Alston campus will be the first step toward a respectable program. The schools at the top, however, are equally if not more ambitious:</p>
<p>No matter how much money your pour into a mediocre program, Stanford can match it effectively with a pre-existing infrastructure and well-managed academic institutions.</p>
<p>Now if only Stanford were willing to invest in top students to the same extent it is willing to invest in salaries for athletes. As it is, Stanford says it will be five years before it is able to provide financial aid to applicants of low income to the extent Harvard, Yale and Princeton have done through recent initiatives.</p>
<p>The shocking fact is that Stanford could easily provide adequate need-based aid if only it would reduce by half the staggering sums it pays to athletic performers. The Ivies award only need-based aid, and do not give athletic scholarships.</p>
<p>There is nothing wrong with defending Harvard; it is commonplace to find many posters, the preponderance of whom attend - or wish to attend - rival institutions, advance various unverifiable and patently false claims.</p>
<p>Byerly, in my opinion, is merely repudiating the unfounded criticisms and other dubious propositions given by various posters.</p>
<p>zephyr - stanford is a stronghold for engineering and cant compare to ivies, simply because most of the ivy league engineering departments arent nearly as big and are among the weakest departments of the schools (thus people pass it by). but, many of the schools are greatly increasing their funding towards engineering and have hopes of expanding it. in the next couple of years u will see the engineering departments change dramatically.</p>
<p>Harvard engineering, while small, remains top-notch. While it lacks a true ChemE department, the students in other fields are very talented (that probably goes without being said). Byerly is correct in his assessment of the poor rankings being a function of a small program, but please still consider Harvard engineering as well as its IVY peers.</p>