Having experienced Admission Day and New Student Orientation and several receptions for Stanford bound kids, I think the biggest assets or advantages of Stanford and perhaps any top college are as follows:
Money to hire best profs, support ECs and offer resources.
They get the biggest percentages of MOTIVATED kids who are very good in one or more areas. These kids are not necessarily the SMARTEST of the bunch IMO but no question in my mind that most of them are pretty motivated kids who expect a lot from themselves. In short, Stanford gets to pick and choose the students they want who they bring something more than high GPAs and test scores.
Resources and non-class activities.
They are able to reach into diverse types of students. For example, my kid shares a quad suite and has a Morrocan-American, Canadian Asian and an athlete in the quad suite.
A lot of support available if you seek it. If you don't seek it, doesn't matter how supportive the college is.
Internship opportunities, chances to study abroad and connections you can build.
In short, everyone appeared to be superficially nice (including convocation speeches), which is better than superficially NOT nice. I came away with a better impression of Stanford than I thought I would. Glad to be home drinking coffee from my coffee mug. lol
My S graduated from Stanford in 2015. I think Stanford has plenty of resources and great profs but to be completely honest, my D goes to Elon and I swear by the profs there too and the resources at that school (If you asked me who had a better experience with profs and one on one attention, research, and over all experience I would hands down say Elon was better. As far as resources, I would say the two schools are equal.) So to be fair I think if you send your kid to any decent University, you will get that for the price tag. Or at least its not something that is just exclusive to Stanford. However, what Stanford does that I haven’t seen or heard of anywhere else is that Stanford looks at each student as 'individually gifted". They believe that each student was selected because they bring something special to the school. So the scholar athletes and the scholar scholars are all treated the same. No one person is a God on that campus. Kids respect each other for who they are and everyone appreciates the diversity of thought, culture, race etc that is found through out the campus. And lastly, that campus is truly comprised of the top 1% of students, worldwide. So your child is truly sitting in classes with the best of the best. Its for these reasons that more billionaires graduated from Stanford than any other university and if Stanford were a country in the Olympics they would be ranked 10th in the world. The possibilities are countless! We love Stanford! We had to work very hard to pay for the school and make this dream a reality for our S. The price tag was extremely scary and painful, but it was worth every penny! Four years later our S was the youngest person on the Forbes 30 under 30 and is now a partner at his company. It wasn’t easy but nothing worth having ever is!
Stanford is unbelievably good, but alas UPenn has produced the most billionaires–18 compared to Stanford’s 13, according to Forbes. But who cares, anyway? Stanford is sui generis.
I stand corrected. But according to Wealth-X reports:
Leading the way is Harvard, the alma mater of 188 billionaires in 2017. Harvard grads — those who earned an undergraduate or graduate degree — represent 6.8 percent of the global billionaire population. In fact, more billionaires attended the school than attended Stanford, MIT and Yale combined.
While No. 2 ranked Stanford has less than half the number of billionaire grads than Harvard, “the average net worth of Stanford’s billionaire population is the highest,” Wealth-X reports
To be clear, I am not sending my kid to Stanford so he can make a lot of money, not that there is anything wrong with being a billionaire. I am financially supporting my kid because he himself wanted to go (we never told him to apply to Stanford) and I can afford it. I would have been happy if he went to an OOS Honors College on merits money. I found that depending on the dorm he’s at and his major, you don’t need a bicycle. My kid is perfectly happy without one.