<p>I've seen HYP, HYPS, HYPSM, HYPSMW, and then a lot of odd ones. I propose that on cc we have a universal acronym for the very best of American education. I think WHYPSM does the trick unless anyone has a better one?</p>
<p>W= Wharton (8.3% admit rate for class of 2011)
H = Harvard (8.97% admit rate for class of 2011)
Y = Yale (9.63% admit rate for class of 2011)
P = Princeton (9.46% admit rate for class of 2011)
S = Stanford (10.29% admit rate for class of 2011)
M = MIT (12.3% admit rate for class of 2011)</p>
<p>If you want to be an engineer, there is no place better than MIT. Interested in business? Wharton is your ticket. Not exactly sure what you want? Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford will all but guarantee sucess in the field of your choice. </p>
<p>And according to this reasoning, you would have to add Columbia College because their admit rate for this last cycle (8.9%) is lower than 4 of the schools on that list.</p>
<p>yah, comment: Acceptance rate isn't important as strength of enrolling class. I've never seen Wharton mentioned above with HYP. I think HYP are still better than Wharton.</p>
<p>ses, I wasn't going by admit rate per se. I'm not overly familiar with Columbia College. Do you think it deserves a spot with Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford for general greatness?</p>
<p>thethoughtprocess, you are right. Wharton (and to a lesser extent MIT) aren't grouped with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton that often. I think they should be</p>
<p>From the Daily Princetonian (10/6/06)</p>
<p>"After all, entry into the financial services sector immediately after Princeton is surprisingly common. Of those members of the class of 2006 who are employed, a whopping 46.8 percent are in financial services, with another 26.6 percent in related services like financial consulting, according to Career Services."</p>
<p>If you include Columbia with Harvard, feel free to include Brown, Penn College, Dartmouth, Duke, Chicago, Williams, Amherst...(ie schools that have strong/stronger students but higher acceptance rates because they aren't in the most populated city in the world)</p>
<p>The difference between HYP, Stanford, MIT, and Wharton and the rest of the top schools is because their students are stronger and their students have better placement and more impressive accomplishments before and after leaving undergrad.</p>
<p>^Same. It should just be Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. It just so happens Stanford and MIT are also equally strong academically just not as well known.</p>
<p>Those of you suggesting that Stanford is less prestigious than HYP are aware of the existence of a part of the country outside the Northeast, aren't you? In the western part of the country, Stanford is almost certainly more prestigious than Yale and Princeton, and I would venture a guess that in the Midwest and South, they are about even.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Well, Princeton is pretty prestigious, but definitely Stanford > Yale in the West.
[/quote]
I would say that Princeton and Yale are pretty equal in prestige on the West Coast. Both are super-elite Ivy League schools that aren't Harvard. If anything, Yale is slightly better known (mostly because its rivalry with Harvard connects them more in people's minds, and Harvard, sadly, remains the most prestigious school pretty much anywhere).</p>
<p>kluge, and then you can leave this thread for people to passionately debate whether C means Caltech, Columbia or Chicago. It's all kind of ridiculous, really. </p>
<p>Of course, to slightly rearrange the OP's acronym, we could use WHYMPS (pronounced like "wimps") but people might not go for that.</p>