posterX

Great post, mzhang. You prove my point - that in order to understand the social life, you need to visit for 2-3 days and talk with as many students and professors as possible - because, presumably, a student visiting would run into people like you and would be interested in your accurate and balanced assessment of things (and would be able to experience and observe them for him/herself). And that same student would be able to do the exact same thing when visiting another school that had a very different system.

As far as financial aid goes, if you look through the records, you'll notice that the 55% figure at Princeton, before Princeton's reform initiative was announced just very recently, was actually 38%. It hovered around 38% for many years while Harvard, Yale, and Columbia's figures were in the 40s. The number suddenly jumped from 38% to 55% because of the way aid was calculated and distributed -- not because the composition of the entering class changed in any significant way. Again, these figures say nothing about diversity. (They also say nothing about the size of the grants people are actually getting, but that's not my point). Diversity is what happens when people of different groups interact with each other on a regular basis, at every meal, in every class: not when they have the same mailing address or college ring. To see what diversity means, as with my point above, you need to visit and see the impact that the very diverse layouts and institutions of each campus have on the amount and quality of interaction between disparate groups.

That's for you to decide. And that's why extensive visits to your top choices are so important.