<p>What do you think?</p>
<p>before anyone answers the question - are you interested in prestige based responses or substantive reasoning as to why one institution is better? If you’re looking for the latter, then its tough to compare any of the Top 25 schools because each is good in its own right. If you want to talk about prestige - then Harvard wins all comparisons.</p>
<p>Search the forum; this question has been asked and responded to many times by many different posters with differing opinions.</p>
<p>:) I know Yale quite simply cannot be better!</p>
<p>Hi, thanks for responding, but I just wanted to hear opinions of people. That is all.</p>
<p>^^Well, on the Harvard board you are going to get a lot of people aying Harvard is better with a few Yalies chiming in to say the opposite. On the Yale board the responses will be the other way around.</p>
<p>My own opinion is that both are fabuolus schools that are far more similar than they are different. Most of the differences that do exist are ones ruled by personal preference rather than objective measures of quality. And finally, it’s really not a serious question until you actually have to make a choice. Come back when you have acceptances to both schools in hand - then we can talk.</p>
<p>coureur that is a silly thing to say. once you get accepted to both schools you have a frantic 30 days to decide where to go and you will be bombarded left and right with advice excitement and blurry vision. so it is good to think of these things early. anyway. i chose harvard. it’s a better school - although both are fantastic.</p>
<p>Let’s ask what you think of that question, Mr. HARVARDlawviolin?</p>
<p>I laughed at that Biggie_Smalls. I love Harvard as much as the next guy (depending on who that may be) but I wanted to know what the people thought. I like Yale too, but not as much as Harvard of course. </p>
<p>rb3, I agree.</p>
<p>coureur, you have a point with the fourm, I should probably post it on the Yale fourm, or even better, the Princeton fourm, to see what those people have to say</p>
<p>There really is no answer, visit both and decide from there. Personally, I like both, and I think I would have enjoyed New Haven as much as Cambridge, but of course I will always prefer Harvard and have no regret that I decided to go to Harvard over Yale.</p>
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<p>The silly thing is spending a lot time worrying about a choice you don’t yet have and are very unlikely to ever have. I suppose there is a certain parlor game entertainment value to musing over such highly theoretical choices, kinda like a guy wondering whether he should date Taylor Swift or Emma Watson, but to actually spend a lot of time and energy over such questions at this point is a waste. Just apply to both and do your best. If you are extremely lucky you will get into ONE of them.</p>
<p>^Agreed, I mean look at admit and yield rates for this year alone:</p>
<p>Harvard admitted 2,048 to the class of 2013 with 76% matriculating ~= 1556
Yale admitted 1,951 to the class of 2013 with 1,327 matriculating</p>
<p>Thus, ~492 did not matriculate to Harvard and could have gone to Yale and 624 did not matriculate that Yale and could have gone to Harvard.</p>
<p>Thinking idealistically, that means that maximum number of students admitted to both is 1116. And if one could get the values since both colleges watch closely how many each loses to go to the other, I’m sure we would find that not all 1116 had this decision, thus, there is a realistic minority in existence.</p>
<p>I find it amazing how harvardlawviolin has 4 threads on the Harvard forum that are at the top. Two of which are the same… </p>
<p>Not criticizing you but it’s just interesting because I was like: didn’t I see this question already?</p>
<p>yeah, i am just interested. and this one got more answers than the other one…</p>
<p>The revealed preference study (which is a little outdated) and anecdotal experience suggest that a pretty high percentage of the people turning either Harvard or Yale down are turning it down for the other. Stanford and Princeton are in the mix, too, but at a much lower level, and there are onesies and twosies of major scholarship winners at other universities. But that’s about it. Probably something like half of the students who don’t enroll at one are enrolling at the other.</p>
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<p>The Revealed Preference study actually had only one firm statistical conclusion, which is that there is a visible set of “the” top six schools (HYPSMC, in some order) and this top group is clearly separated from the next tier (Columbia, Brown, etc).</p>
<p>Within the top six the model had all sorts of problems, such as:
-trouble deciding whether or not Harvard outranks Caltech;
-placing Caltech at #2;
-giving Caltech a 50-point edge over MIT when the real-life cross admit battle has, every year, favored MIT by a margin of about 3 to 1, equivalent to a 200-point loss;
-ranking Yale above MIT (game over!) in the sub-sample of science and engineering students.</p>
<p>Basically, the Revealed Preferences study or any variant thereof, produces loosely distinguishable tiers of schools (as we knew before RP) and gets muddled trying to rank linearly within tiers (as we also knew before RP). The only real novelty is that the folk concept of “lower” or “lesser” Ivies" is visible in their data, due to the clear separation of the first and second tiers. Apparently the heyday of Brown or Columbia’s desirability compared to HYP had passed by 1999-2000 when the survey was done.</p>
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<p>That doesn’t sound right. Harvard/Yale/Princeton are interchangeable for most purposes, with Harvard having a yield advantage due to location and its professional schools. They split the non-science and East Coast mutual admits mostly among each other, with Harvard taking the lion’s share. Other than that, the web of overlaps has to include MIT (which Harvard deans have stated is consistently their #1 rival in cross admit rate, and does NOT lose three-fourths of common admits to Harvard), and the Stanford-Caltech-UC configuration especially as it relates to West Coast, Asian, and science/engineering populations.</p>