I will also add that of all these power schools… Stanford’s student body is less than a quarter of the other schools yet still manages to produce the top athletic program in the country… and this years Olympics will be stocked with Stanford athletes.
so major difference is big time athletics at Stanford… with big time academics.
here are the rankings for nobel prizes this century
Stanford University
Columbia University
University of California, Berkeley
Princeton University
University of Chicago
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
University of California, Santa Barbara
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Technion Israel Institute of Technology
Max Planck Society
@menloparkmom
lol you said it yourself, amongst those who DO know about top universities Caltech is considered #1 and rightfully so. I am talking about perception amongst the general population globally not the perception of those who are actually knowledgeable about top schools. The chance of a random person knowing Harvard, MIT, Stanford is much higher than that of knowing Caltech for the reasons I mentioned above. This doesn’t mean anything about the quality of Caltech of course, caltech people are practically geniuses, it is just due to the fact that it is more niche that the other three schools.
Stanford does have one of the best athletic programs in the nation. I would not chose a school based upon its athletic programs. You go to school to learn something not to watch academically sub par students compete in sports.
Here is an article from the Stanford Daily questioning whether the 67 Million Dollars spent on athletics is part of the Stanford mission and “how much are they willing to sacrifice academics for athletic success”
http://www.stanforddaily.com/2015/02/22/the-price-of-athletics-at-stanford/
funny stuff…“this century” is 16 years old. Stanford is a dot.com boom-child flexing its muscles. Funny you never see Harvard, Princeton or Yale people thumping their chests on the Stanford boards. Stanford is a great school, and the climate is wonderful I hear. You needn’t be so obsessed with getting respect. 
Closing thread. As far as I can tell, the OP has abandoned the thread, probably due to the ridiculous and useless bickering over trivial issues that has been the majority of posting. I would suggest in the future that at the very least, members not assume that their likes and dislikes are the same as an OP’s unless the OP has stated something specific. For example
*Well, guess what? A lot of students do choose between very academically similar schools based on things like athletics, weather, urban vs. rural, etc. Wouldn’t it have been better to simply point out that Stanford competes at the highest levels of NCAA sports, while Harvard generally doesn’t? The presence of the athletes off the field, whether they are let in with lower standards or not, is not going to affect his academic experience there. Same kind of thing with the shopping malls, etc. Absolutely ridiculous to extend some kind of meaning to that instead of just pointing out it exists and letting them decide if it is meaningful. Because the fact of the matter is that it probably only takes 5-10 more minutes in Cambridge to get to all the fancy shopping and restaurants in Boston via the trains/subway, and one can weigh that versus the somewhat more cumbersome issue it is to get into SF from Palo Alto. I would suggest that some on here think about if they have truly been helping the OP versus serving their own agendas.
You know what else is surprising to me? That in 5 pages of posts not once was the fact that Stanford is on 10 week quarters versus the 16-17 week semesters of the East coast schools mentioned. Perhaps it is just me, but that seems like a pretty tasty tidbit to bring up. It makes a big difference to some students, not so much to others, but at least putting it out there, with some perceived pros and cons, as a potential difference maker seems like it would have made some sense.*