<p>lol don't take any of it too seriously--</p>
<p>for all practical purposes it's the same thing if you go to Columbia or Penn... no one at this point is going to wag their finger at either. THat said... 10-15 years ago it's a really different story where, as you said, Penn = doormat of the Ivy. </p>
<p>Columbia fell, Penn rised, they are about equal now. Columbia, however, has more layman and international "prestige"/name-recognition--- but again, in practical terms, this basically doesnt amount to much. It is much harder to gain admissions into Columbia though...</p>
<p>"Admissions stats (College Board) seem to put HYPM on at the top with Penn, Columbia, Stanford in a pretty close group. Dartmouth and Duke as well. Caltech, of course, has super high math scores; the others for them are kind of irrelevant."</p>
<p>Caltech has higher CR scores than MIT, Stanford, Columbia, Penn and Dartmouth, tied only with Duke, and has writing scores higher than any of those schools.</p>
<p>The size of Caltech per year is roughly ~250-300 kids at the undergraduate leve. Let's consider the smallest of the Ivies in that group, Columbia & Dartmouth. Columbia has around ~1300 undergraduates/year.</p>
<p>Okay now let's view this mathematically.</p>
<p>If you are culling an applicant pool for TOP students... it's a lot easier to maintain a high average when you take in 300 kids than 1300. I will bet you my bottom dollar that if you took the top 300 kids in Columbia College/Fu's SAT scores, they will be just as high as CalTechs.</p>
<p>THIS is not even to mention the fact that Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown/other ivies does not emphasize scores as much as Caltech. I've met people here that are stars from SPANGLISH (yea the white girl-- shes in my science class), one of the top 5 violinists in the United States (studied with Pearlman, Tsaikotsky Festival 1st place, Julliard concertmaster at 17 etc) and that's just the people I know/talk to and quite a few Math/Physics/Chem/Bio olympic finalists and a Canadian IMO gold medalist. Find that at Caltech.</p>
<p>I am sure the top 300 at Berkeley are even better, what's your point? The average is pretty important, too. If everyone in a class is at a similar high level, discussion and pace are much better than if you have a wide spectrum down to mediocrity.</p>