<p>Princeton engineering grads do very well with grad school placement If you have your heart set on Princeton, and plan to go to graduate school in engineering, you will be fine. </p>
<p>The draw for Stanford is the techie culture and the can-do attitude of Silicon Valley. If the culture of Princeton appeals to you more, by all means go to Princeton. You are definitely not settling.</p>
<p>One other thing to note, is that at least in EE, Princeton professors tend to have a more theoretical bent to their research. This could be very good for grad school placement. The reason for this slant, as explained to me by a Princeton EE professor many years ago, is that they are not as reliant on outside funding for their research funds; they get most of it from the endowment. They do theory because they can!</p>
<p>Stanford professors, on the other hand, are often the founders of start-ups based on their research. That’s how you get status in Silicon Valley.</p>
<p>I want to strongly echo the comments of papachicken. These are two terrific colleges, but their engineering student bodies have somewhat different priorities. For the most entrepreneurial environment and an unmatched access to the goings-on of Silicon Valley, Stanford would be a superior choice and engineering students generally aren’t going there as preparation for a Wall Street career. </p>
<p>By contrast, Princeton’s engineering students are often less dedicated to the actual world of engineering and more interested in using their engineering degrees as positioning for placement with some I-bank or hedge fund quant shop in NYC or Greenwich or somewhere in the Northeast. </p>
<p>Neither choice is right/wrong and neither necessarily inhibits the student from achieving in any environment. The students/graduates at both are terrific and that’s what employers really want. So the choice really comes down to which school’s environment you favor. </p>
<p>As a personal plug, I think that Stanford is the premier college in America in its quality of academics and the quality and breadth of experiences available for its undergraduates. Unless I knew very explicitly that I wanted to work in a Wall Street or related capacity in metro NYC area (which would favor Princeton and its excellent and large network), I’d choose Stanford all day long.</p>
<p>Just want to add that Stanford graduates don’t do badly in quantitative finance at all, though I agree with a previous poster that there are valid doubts about the long-term viability of quantitative finance itself.</p>
<p>At the same time, Princeton graduates don’t do badly with start-ups; Jeff Bezos and Meg Whitman are both Princeton graduates.</p>
<p>You might, however, want to consider Princeton’s grade deflation policy.</p>
<p>The policy does not affect science and engineering courses very much, as they are already grade deflated (probably at Stanford as well), but when you try to “come up for air” in your humanities distribution courses, you might find yourself working harder than you would like.</p>
<p>Everything here sounds good. Sorry to detract, but what does quantitative finance have to do with business itself? I’m interested in engineering as well as maybe business, but the fact of the matter is that I haven’t experienced anything first hand, so I have NO IDEA what I want to do for a career. How could one find out for sure that working on Wall Street or in NYC is a definite choice? I’ve never even been to the East Coast!</p>
<p>Either way, I plan to visit both campuses for the preview weekends, but will probably choose Princeton (even though I may plan to study engineering, and have nothing to do with business at all).</p>
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May I suggest, if you’re not already planning it, that you try to sit in on some engineering classes at each when you visit?</p>
<p>Good luck on your decision.</p>