<p>Prepster, the real flaw in those rankings is not including either Stanford Business or Stanford Law, both of which are consensus top-three. Stanford would probably do a lot better than fourth.</p>
<p>As for your statement:</p>
<p>"Yes, Harvard is in a league of its own by virtue of the breadth and quality that it is able to offer.
...
No school in the world comes close to Harvard's quality for its size."</p>
<p>That's simply wrong. Harvard may/may not be the best, but Stanford, for example, can offer better engineering, better physics, better mathematics. And the humanities and social sciences remain as good as if not better than Harvard's. Stanford is about the same size as Harvard and more or less equals H's "quality" as you state it. Your generalizations, unfortunately, are vast and hollow. What can Harvard offer that Princeton, Yale and Stanford cannot? </p>
<p>"However it cannot compete in breadth with Harvard, seeing as it has no Medical School, no Law School, no Business School-indeed no professional schools at all."
Stanford has all of those. It can therefore "compete in breadth with Harvard," right?</p>