<p>I visited Princeton during Spring Break and I fell in love. I really liked:
- Academic atmosphere
- Motivated and outgoing student body (i spend sometime with a few alumni from my school there and saw them study and discuss hw, etc)
- Excellent professors (one talked to me for like 20 minutes, I was touched)
- Superb economics and political science departments
- Strong mathematics, computer science, and sciences
- Woodrow Wilson option
- Research opportunities
- Undergradate focus
- Medium sized population
- Beautiful campus
- Proximity to urban areas</p>
<p>Also, during Spring Break I visited Swarthmore, Penn, Columbia, and Yale. I did not particularly liked Swarthmore (too small) and Columbia (too graduate focused). I loved Penn and liked Yale.</p>
<p>I'm wondering what schools are similar to Princeton. Obviously, many applicants (esp from my school - TJ) apply to Princeton along with Harvard and Yale and few get into 2 or 3 of them, but I'm more interested to know about the schools that are slightly less selective than Princeton that share many of the characteristics I liked about this school.</p>
<p>Well... a school that actually isn't anything much like Princeton at all, but strangely has most of the qualities that you said you liked about it (strange, eh?) is UChicago... amazing economics, great math and sciences, academic atomosphere, proximity to urban areas, etc... the only problem is that UChicago is definitely more graduate focused than undergraduate... <em>shrug</em> </p>
<p>You might also want to check out Rice, it seems to have a lot in common with what you like.</p>
<p>It doesn't have the proximity to urban areas... not even close... but Dartmouth always seems a lot like Princeton...</p>
<p>The problem is that Princeton is quite small and quite undergrad focused, so the schools most like it are LACs. But LACs seem a bit too small for you... it's a fine line.</p>
<p>I don't agree that U Chicago is grad focused...people always say that that's the great thing about Chicago....that its focus on the undergrads is tops....I think the population at U Chicago might be a bit less....um......social than Princeton.....(eating clubs there)..and U Chicago might have a greater workload. I can't think of anyplace quite like Princeton. It's unique.</p>
<p>Stanford is just as selective as Princeton and it has many similarities to it. Many of the kids I have met at the admit weekends were deciding between these two and they seem to have very similar admissions criteria. half of the kids i met decided on princeton while the other half picked stanford though many of them said it was so hard to decide since they were so similar in terms of the kind of people and overall feel</p>
<p>I think Dartmouth has a lot of similar qualities to P-ton. Both schools share the undergrad focus, beautiful campus, the small-town feel (although D is much more isolated to a big city than P), and both seem more conservative and preppy than their Ivy counterparts. That's not to say you won't find a fair share of liberals at each though. So if you can deal with rural NH for the next four years, then definitely look into Dartmouth.</p>
<p>By the way, If you love Princeton, apply ED. There's a much better chance you'll get in. (30% accpetance rate as opposed to 10%)</p>
<p>lol, the rest of the Ivies, Stanford, Duke, and Rice fit most of the criteria in the way of academics...except maybe not the 'proximity' to an urban area one</p>
<p>Though not as similar to Princeton as Rice, Stanford, or Chicago, Vanderbilt has some definite similarites. It's in a big-but-not-huge city (~1 million people), has a good econ department, and like Princeton, has a rapidly receding reputation for blue-blooded preppy snobbishness that's being replaced with a much more diverse, open, cosmopolitan social scene.
It is known for excellent undergraduate teaching, and its selectivity is rising very quickly.</p>
<p>I second Dartmouth as being much like P-ton in its undergrad focus and (large) LAC-like in its size. And Swarthmore is quite small, even by LAC standards. Have you considered some of the larger LACs? Williams at 2100 may still be too small for you (great econ and science, though), but what about schools like Wesleyan and Middlebury which are somewhat larger. Wesleyan has close to 3000 undergrads, and Middlebury is working its way up to that number (according to its president).</p>
<p>Come on now people...Georgetown. It's exactly what he's looking for, incredibly similar to Princeton - way similar atmosphere. Your description of what you liked about Princeton could well have been a list of the plus sides of Georgetown. It's 21% acceptance vs. 10% and as you're into Poly Sci and Economics there aren't many places you could go that teach them better or are better situated for their study (DC). If you were to apply for SFS though then it's not that much easier to get into than Pton.</p>