@jzducol She never applied to Harvard in the first place, because Harvard pales in comparison to Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UCLA in STEM. Yale does has a decent STEM program, but only at the Master’s or Ph.D. level, not for undergrad. So Yale would be useless to her for engineering. She clicked on Columbia strictly for practicality due to the application fee waiver.
In fact, with the exception of Yale grad school, all the other Ivies are very weak in STEM programs. For example, only MIT and Purdue have a Nuclear Reactor on their campuses, the Ivies don’t have the funding for that. In STEM, the most important part she was looking for was the school’s research funding, for it is pointless to learn so much theoretical math without the resources with which to build anything concrete. The top STEM schools in the nation have the top research funding, such as from the U.S. Department of Defense, the Air Force, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and other private donors. Due to her STEM strength with Aerospace Engineering, Computer/Software Engineering, and Cyber Security (volunteer mentoring & coaching), she only clicked on the very few non-Ivies-but-still-top-tiers that have decent undergrad engineering programs with research funding at the undergrad level.
She also never bothered with MIT or Caltech because she didn’t nail a perfect 1600 on the new SAT. I told her that a 1490 is a shame to my ancestors’ altars. 750 - 770s on her SAT Subject Tests are also a shame to my side of the family. My policy for her: anything less an 800 across all the Subject Tests, she may not apply to MIT or Caltech. Her father is already the biggest disgrace to us by not obeying the judge’s order on monthly child support since she was 3 years old. When he dodged the legal radar by not holding down jobs, moving out of the state, and even moving out of the country for that many years, I’m not about to stoop down to his level and hunt him down for a single penny. That is the Family Legacy he chose to uphold for his family name, that’s the legacy he will live. His choice. His loss.