<p>Princeton -- I had a very hard time choosing between them.</p>
<p>Both schools are located in fairly quiet, affluent suburbs about an hour away from the city. As a result, both have cohesive, campus-centered cultures (unlike UPenn and Columbia). Students are brilliant but most are generally not very intense and high-strung (unlike those of Harvard and Cornell). Because Princeton is very undergraduate-centered (there are twice as many undergrads as grads, unlike Stanford, where it's roughly 50:50) the student body is very collaborative and the undergraduate student government has a lot of influence. Academically, both schools are known for their strength in science and engineering, and the engineering school is not separated from the arts either socially or institutionally (Columbia, Cornell, and UPenn separate the schools, though they do have interdisciplinary programs.) They're also strong in humanities -- both schools have notable introductory humanities tracks (IHUM for Stanford and the humanities sequence for Princeton). Both are strong in pre-law preparation and creative writing. If Princeton's perceived preppy stereotype is a problem, apparently there are probably more popped collars at Stanford than there are at Princeton (according to my Stanford friends.)</p>