<p>If you look at the SAT scores of the incoming classes, the average Columbia student sweeps the average Stanford student in all three sections. </p>
<p>20 points in critical reading
5 points in math
5 points in writing</p>
<p>There you have it! Columbia clearly gets smarter kids than Stanford! Stanford sucks!</p>
<p>Only kidding.</p>
<p>In reality those scores are pretty darn close, especially when you consider how high the scores are. Too close to declare Columbia a winner. Like someone else said, once you get to a certain score, it hardly matters.</p>
<p>These two Universities belong to an elite club consisting of only the very best Universities on the planet. The differences between them are inconsequential and subjective.</p>
<p>I found the comment about Stanford being “much much more prestigious than Columbia” to be absurd. Being a fan of one does not mean you have to trash the other. These are not baseball teams.</p>
<p>Go Yankees! (The Mets suck! …and don’t even start me on the Red Sox!)</p>
<p>Columbia purposely fails to include SAT figures from 20% of the undergraduate kids, those of the General Studies program, which take the same classes with same professors as the regular Columbia College undergraduates. If these were included, the Columbia University SAT’s would be in the range of the 20th ranked universities - way below those of Stanford…</p>
<p>As a whole they are both fantastic universities. I think they attract different kids, which may even explain the slight difference in SAT scores. Although my S goes to Stanford, I’m a New Yorker so I could never put Columbia down. </p>
<p>One thing I do find interesting is that I think Stanford has a lot more international recognition. Outside of the US, I would stay that Stanford has a more well recognized name. I’m only saying that from experience. My husband works for one the largest global companies. As a result thats what he has been told when he goes abroad (Europe, Asia, Mexico, Canada, Australia) For whatever that may be worth.</p>
<p>Agreed. I was told that in Asia, Harvard and Stanford are viewed as the top universities in the US. Stanford is better known internationally than other comparable institutions because of its connection to Silicon Valley and high tech industry.</p>
<p>Academically, Columbia, U of Chicago, Caltech have a better reputation than Stanford, but Stanford is a new rich guy with the help of high tech location. </p>
<p>1 California Institute of Technology
2 Harvard University
2 Stanford University
4 University of Oxford
5 Princeton University
6 University of Cambridge
7 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
8 Imperial College London
9 University of Chicago
10 University of California, Berkeley
11 Yale University
12 Columbia University</p>
<p>note: the above is for undergraduate schools, but if you would review the similar academic results for graduate schools, the gap between Stanford and the others would be greater</p>
<p>1- Stanford has only recently taken a turn for the technological, since about the 1970’s
2- All of Stanford’s Nobel prizes have been won since 1960, and over 90% since 1970, so perhaps Columbia was more prestigious during WWII.
3- Most of the ivy schools are significantly older than Stanford, like hundreds of years older, so they’ve had a huge head start.
4- Stanford graduates are more encouraged to live awesomely and start a business or do something fun, rather than just becoming a boring labrat.
5- Stanford students are exposed to sun and pretty Cali girls, and are therefore more likely to spend more of their time outside, away from books.</p>
<p>Even though relative prestige is meaningless and boring/useless to talk about, I don’t want any grandiosity grubbers from out east stealing anything that’s not theirs.</p>
<p>so now Columbia, UChicago and Caltech have a better academic reputation than Stanford because, through the years, they have had more nobel prize winners that graduated from those schools…gee, does that mean that UCLA, according to your measuring stick, has a better academic reputation than Stanford?</p>
<p>Now no one can call me biased against using Nobel prizes because I went to Stanford seeing as I’m currently at Caltech which has by far the highest percentage of graduates who have gotten Nobel prizes. That said, Nobel prizes are a horrible measurement of ‘prestige’ or ‘academic reputation’. The reason why Caltech has more nobel prize graduates than stanford is because they care more about the fundamental sciences than stanford does.</p>
<p>by comparing their grad schools and the value fo the school overall stanford comes out ahead
stanford’s also #1 in the eyes of high school counselors apparently</p>
<p>Depends on which ranking you use. The ARWU ranking, arguably the most comprehensive and authoritative ranking, places Stanford at #2 in the world, and Columbia at #8. Anecdotally, from my observations in the US and based on first-hand knowlege, I would argue that Stanford is a notch above Columbia.</p>
<p>But if you say Stanford is much much more prestigious than the other one, how can a more prestigious college get less intellectual students? What a joke!</p>
<p>@JamieBrown, please don’t reply. Let the thread die. What the title said was why Stanford ranked lower than Columbia by a trashy magazine. The OP should have asked USNWR, not here, if the OP actually believes them.</p>
<p>it appears that JennieW is one of those many many many students that failed to get accepted at HYPSM (their dream schools), got accepted into Columbia and are trying very hard to justify their enrollment into Columbia.</p>
<p>Columbia is a great school, but nowhere near HYPSM.</p>