<p>I don’t need to convince you of anything. If I said Princeton is superior to Yale in Art History, I would be totally wrong but if I said Princeton is superior to Yale in STEM, you can’t prove otherwise. Princeton uses the building where Einstein and others worked on the hydrogen bomb as the starting point for presentations and visitor tours. Think about its significance.</p>
<p>Yale is trying to attract the best STEM candidates by hosting this major event for the last couple of years and they are attracting pretty smart award winning kids. They are trying to spend huge amounts of money in making the sciences a lot more attractive. However, they are nowhere close to being superior to Princeton in STEM. If that were the case, Princeton has nothing to deserve its number 1/2 ranking for past several years and Yale would be defacto number 2. </p>
<p>I don’t have a kid in either school or any affiliation with either.</p>
So you discount the rankings I provided while spouting how Princeton is top ranked? And where is this supposed ranking outside of your mind? I agree that in certain engineering disciplines Princeton might have an edge but I don’t buy their science superiority. Still waiting on that evidence. ;)</p>
<p>Also, I don’t see how a building makes a school better, maybe if Einstein was teaching there I would agree with you.</p>
<p>While I don’t often post on the Yale forum (since I’m a Princeton alum) and while I think that Yale is a magnificent school, your implicit statement that somehow Princeton students are not happy or are not surrounded by happy people is just plain wrong. Princeton students are generally extremely happy with the school and with one another. Most of them are very similar to students who attend Yale (as you can see by the stats and the cross-admits etc.). Moreover, as you can see from the alumni giving stats and by the sheer number of alumni who attend reunions, Princeton graduates feel incredibly loyal to their school and passionate about their college experience. I seriously doubt that unhappy students would somehow translate into happy, loyal alumni.</p>
<p>There are reasons to choose Yale over Princeton or Princeton over Yale, but I firmly believe that most students at both schools love their college experience.</p>
<p>I am deciding between Yale and Columbia (was waitlisted at Princeton, which is weird because I have sibling legacy there). I had a terrible visit to Yale. After the tour I asked a student if she could give a recommendation for lunch, and she said, “Sorry I’m going to be late for class” and just kept on walking. At Princeton, the kids were extraordinarily friendly and everybody seemed nicer/happier. I asked a student there for lunch recommendations and she talked for probably 12 minutes and then offered to take me to her residential college for lunch… What a difference.</p>
<p>I am not convinced an academic score of 62 for Yale vs 98 for Harvard makes it a big deal as a rank. It is like saying Harvard has an A but Yale has an F but somehow they are only 6 ranks below. And biology is just one science subject. Where are your rankings for physics, chemistry, engineering?</p>
<p>The building is telling you here is where atom bomb originated. Does Yale have anything in science which is of significance?</p>
<p>Perception means a great deal in college rankings and quality, because realistically a STEM undergraduate student could get just as good an education at Georgia Tech as Yale or any of the other Ivies.</p>
<p>But the reason the Ivies or Stanford get so much attention and applicants who have never visited is perception. And I’m saying this as someone who got into Yale and Stanford.</p>
<p>And the perception I’ve gotten and seen through my anecdotal and non-scientific observations is that Princeton is indeed better at STEM but Yale is trying to buck up and compete with Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton. </p>
<p>Now you can get the same STEM education at Yale, Princeton, or even Georgia Tech if you utilize your professors and resources, but the perception factor gives it to Princeton in my opinion. </p>
<p>And there are also areas where Yale is perceived to be ahead of Harvard or Princeton (such as in history or international relations), when in reality they’re all equal. </p>
<p>So to the OP and a fellow Australian, I would advise you compare their intangibles because everything quantifiable (number of courses offered, number of top professors teaching etc) is pretty much comparable between Princeton and Yale regardless of what any survey says.</p>
<p>It is my opinion that UG is for receiving very basic education. This is especially true in the STEM area. Most of these major-specific rankings are not very relevant to most UG students, as long as the UG curriculum is solid enough.</p>
<p>For many students at many Ivies, the graduate school ranking may not be very relevant to them even eventually. Why? Most of them head to some lucrative career like i-banking/consulting or a professional school any way, rather than go to graduate school to further their education in STEM. While STEM majors in many other countries may have a “higher status”, it appears that this is not so here. (BTW, you may notice there is a much higher percentage of STEM graduate students at many top graduate schools who are either internationals or children of new immigrants. These students may indeed pay a lot of attention to this kind of ranking because it is more relevant to them.)</p>
<p>Just an example of where may be the “next stop” of these students: In the couple of years when DS was graduated from his high school, there were 4 students who attended Yale. So far, 3 of them attended med school and one of them attended law school. None of them attended graduate school.</p>
<p>Also, out of 6 suitemates in DS’s freshman year, zero attended the graduate school. (either one or two headed to Wall Street.) Please tell me whether these students would care very much about the ranking of graduate school, STEM or not! They may care more about the ranking of overal UG school ranking in US (not the ranking with the name “World Ranking…”) because the US’s ranking may help them get into their next stop because their college is the so-called “target school” in the field they are interested in getting into – especially in the i-banking area. (I may be quite shallow by saying this!)</p>
<p>Re texaspg’s question: “Does Yale have anything in science which is of significance?” Well, as long as you’re going to point to stuff that happened ages ago - ever heard of Gibbs free energy? Gibbs (a Yale professor for his entire career) was arguably the greatest scientist of his time, and several of the advances he made continue to be exceptionally relevant to a wide variety of scientific/engineering fields today - a great deal more relevant than the H-bomb, I dare say. But I digress None of this has anything to do with whether Yale or Princeton is a better for an undergraduate interested in STEM today.</p>
<p>I know there’s a debate going on here and I’m kind of ruining it, but I was just wondering how people were going to visit princeton and yale? are you guys just going to go to both in the same week, or yale first then princeton the next week?</p>
<p>livorneo - I have heard of Gibbs. How many other parents or students have?</p>
<p>I agree with both Carbon and Mcat2. The perception is Princeton is better for sciences and the rankings stem from graduate school which are totally useless. But students choose based on perception and what they plan on doing in 4 years. There will be a point in 5-10 years when Yale no longer need to issue STEM focused likelies which is when everyone knows Yale feels comfortable enough they are attracting enough STEM focused students without having a STEM event or focused LLs.</p>
<p>Well, since this is the Yale board, I’m going to mention a couple of pros of Yale over Princeton (in my opinion).
First, I don’t agree that Princeton is “better” than New Haven. The areas immediately around campus aren’t all that different, really–and New Haven is an actual city. I also think New Haven has more interesting places to eat (opinion, of course). I guess Princeton is “nicer” than New Haven.
Second, while I think students at both places are generally happy, Yale’s residential college system is brilliantly designed to create a positive living experience. In my opinion, Princeton’s eating club system is designed to make some people very happy and others, not so happy. Princeton has more of a social structure than Yale does, in my observation. To me, that’s a plus for Yale; others may differ.</p>
<p>I do have to agree, though, that Princeton is probably better for at least some of the hard sciences, just because it attracts better students (at least, those who don’t go to MIT).</p>
<p>Location is one of the major differences between Princeton and Yale. Princeton is a stunning campus – it’s bucolic and styled as suburban, but I’ve never been sure what Princeton is a suburb of. Yale is also a stunning campus, but the antithesis of bucolic. It’s urban and vertical and pulsing with energy. It’s hard for me to imagine a student not immediately preferring one location over the other; it all depends on your temperament and preferences.</p>
<p>This was my son’s dilemma and it caused serious agony in this household, but as we live in Princeton, the lure of the unknown ultimately prevailed.</p>
<p>I think either school will provide a wonderful college experience and will be equally outstanding in terms of the education received and the prospects for career trajectory and graduate or professional school after graduation.</p>
<p>Each school obviously has a different personality (in addition to the urban vs suburban settings of the campuses); I would endorse the perception that there are slightly different strengths in terms of academic programs and extracurriculars. One area academically where Yale has the edge is Directed Studies, which is a rare and magnificent program. Although Princeton has much to offer in the performing arts, Yale definitely has the inner track there as well. </p>
<p>As an academic, I prefer a contemplative campus like Princeton, but my son was drawn to the more vibrant, popping atmosphere of Yale’s urban setting. As one professor put it, “Everyone at Yale drives with their brights on all the time.” </p>
<p>Definitely visit both campuses as much as you can and meet with faculty in the departments you are interested in. And trust your instincts. Even if you can’t articulate why you have a certain reaction, you’ve unconsciously understood something.</p>
<p>Stringkeymom - well said! Best answer I’ve read </p>
<p>Advice of >>And trust your instincts. Even if you can’t articulate why you have a certain reaction, you’ve unconsciously understood something. << invaluable, wish I’d said that.</p>
<p>So you talked to a girl who is apparently late for class; if you stop me on my way to class when I’m a couple of minutes late that’s exactly the kind of response you should expect from me, and not to mention I don’t appreciate being stopped by strangers when it’s clear I’m in a hurry, prospie or not. And even if she’s just unfriendly by nature, people like here are in every institution and there is actually no significant difference between the individuals you’re going to meet. As a college student who is in contact with many, many college students across the United States, I know this for a fact. There is no one type of Yalie.</p>
<p>It’s unfortunate the other poster had the bad influence with the Yalie who was late for class. Obviously using a situation like that is a heuristic, but it’s hard to just disregard that. I actually had the type of experience this poster had at Princeton at Yale; everyone was staggeringly nice.</p>
<p>@texaspg: what does the fact that Einstein did important research have to do with current strength of curriculum? It is indicative of a history rich with academia (it is Princeton, after all), but that doesn’t indicate anything specific about the departments so many years later, especially when being compared to a peer institution. And if you’re looking for little tidbits of that sort, Yale is home to the Peabody Museum (and one of the country’s only two undergraduate particle accelerators).</p>
<p>stringkeymom said it all for me too.
The post post on this subject.
Two great schools, different characters. My D visited Yale and Princeton last spring. Concluded both were great / excellent and comparable schools, but the “vibe” she got led her to not apply to Princeton at all, but got her very excited about Yale so much that she applied SCEA</p>
<p>My D was admitted to Y and P (and Stanford) and is touring all of those campuses now (again) to try to make her decision. She loves the energy at Yale, and so applied there SCEA. Thinks she wants to study STEM (engineering/computer sciences), so that pushes a little toward P (and a lot toward S). On the other hand, Y has been great about creating a “mini Bulldog Days” agenda for her visit this week, whereas P said that they could not accommodate admitted student visits on other than Princeton Preview weekends. (She is on P campus tonight as I write this.) I may post more about her thoughts upon her return from all three campuses.</p>
<p>radsquared - no one mentioned either on the yale tour and I went on regular, science as well as engineering tour on the same day. </p>
<p>Perception beats everything else. The day STEM students believe Yale is a peer to Princeton for STEM, you will see that Yale has stopped issuing STEM likelies.</p>
None of this has anything to do with whether Yale or Princeton is a better for an undergraduate interested in STEM today.</p>