Thank you for your detailed answer. I guess every college has its own advantages. I just watched “A Beautiful Mind” again. What a brilliant movie!
Princeton is a better school all around particularly in Math, if that is your major.
Thanks for posting the study, Gibby. That’s what I was looking for and it seems to illustrate just what I expected. I could go into a tirade about how there is more to the college experience than wanting to make a lot of money, but everyone here knows that. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be seeking to spend the next four years surrounded by the best and brightest.
@Rebellionban The answer is rather simple. If you also got into Harvard then which of the two offers would you choose? If you are sure you will go to Princeton no matter what then why bother applying to Harvard? If you think you could choose Harvard then sure go ahead and apply. Just apply for the right reasons.
For example I know some hyper-competitive people that got into Yale or Princeton SCEA and were pretty set on attending, but still wanted to apply to Harvard and/or Stanford to see if they could get accepted to what are considered the hardest schools to get into in the country, just to satisfy their ego. This is rather unnecessary imho.
There have been studies of dual admits between Harvard and Princeton. For whatever reason about 80 per cent choose Harvard and 20 per cent choose Princeton. The other thing to think about is at least half of the people who think they want to be math majors switch majors. A lot of the initial math majors wind up in either statistics or CS. Harvard has a statistics department and Princeton does not