Sat is not the only standard for admission. HYPMS rejected many students with Perfect Sat score. It is even meaningless to compare middle SAT score to determine the best college.
The students got into HYPMS in our school most of them have national or international awards, such as Siemens, Intel STS, USAMO, international art competition, physict, chemistry, biology Olympiad national or international award.
Harvard's cross admission dada beat all the other schools. I won't ignore the facts like some Columbia fans and argue that other schools are better than Harvard. Most students will pick Harvard over other colleges for sure.
I will also not use the facts that some few students who picked other colleges over Harvard to defend Harvard is worse than others. One students got admitted by HYMPS and others. Finally the students attended Duke since Duke offered full ride and the student did not qualify for other college need based financial aid.
Here is another ranking. Clearly Columbia is second to HYMPS and Caltech.
desk123 is the CC equivalent of a tin foil hatter, a climate change denier, a birther, a jobs numbers truther and a "legimate rape" doesn't get you pregnant advocate. What an ignoramus! Keep digging desk.
Why Columbia fans keep ignoring the facts that all HYPMS cross admission data?
Students' actions show that they prefer to attend HYPMS better than Columbia.
BalletGirl-- You can use all the dirty words, but it won't change the facts most top 1% students won't apply ED to Columbia.
HYMPS never use ED to bind students. Only Columbia and Cornell will do that.
If Columbia think it is better than others, it should change ED to EA and let students to decide where they want to go.
Completely agree. Nothing says "insecure" like a school that has to form a binding contract with its applicants to get them to attend!
I don't think any school that uses binding early admissions can really ever be considered the very best, because they're basically acknowledging that they're not the very best by simply having ED. Only the best schools can have the luxury to give their students a choice, and yet still get a large majority of them to attend. They're also good enough not to have to so blatantly inflate their admissions stats with ED.
Columbia freshman here. I was waitlisted at Stanford this year, and would have surely gone had they taken me off (I'm a CS major, hence my bias towards Stanford). Nonetheless, Columbia's a fantastic school which has garnered nothing but awe when mentioned - amongst both laymen and academics. I don't feel like I'm losing out on many opportunities at Columbia compared to Stanford. If anything, I have way too much to do. The classes are well-taught, the workload is intense, the opportunities outside class are overwhelming. Though a few doors may have closed from not being in SV, many more doors have opened from being in NYC. NYC has a massive startup presence, second only to Silicon Valley. Startups and large companies like Microsoft, Google have events often. Banking representatives basically live on campus - Goldman, JP Morgan, Blackrock recruit heavily.
There are lots of incredibly smart people at Columbia, and even more incredibly dumb people (but I realize that the latter is common amongst all top universities - I've met plenty of imbeciles from Yale and MIT. It's more of me being disappointed with the average American education coming from Asia).
All in all, Stanford and Columbia are peer schools in my view, with the edge given to Stanford. Stanford isn't leagues ahead of Columbia, hopelessly outclassing it as some extremists have said on this forum, nor is Columbia a much better school than Stanford like the other Columbia students have told you. I've given you a qualitative argument. I can pull up statistics (which are often incorrect) to prove one is better than the other. Take what you want from this.
I know this is an old thread, but in case anyone reads this I thought I'd point out that when the USN&WR report rankings were first issued they were based solely on peer rankings. Under this methodology Stanford was consistently ranked #1 (sometimes tied with Harvard). And Stanford is still at the top if you look strictly at peer rankings.
Over the years USN&WR has repeatedly tweaked the rankings methodology by adding and adjusting purportedly objective factors like retention rates, alumni giving, admission rates, SAT scores, etc. However, all that did is substitute the editor's view of what factors might be important in measuring prestige for that of the peer institutions. That's why you get anomalies where schools seem to be ranking higher (or lower) than their historical prestige might indicate. It's like the difference between the AP poll and BCS poll in college football. Adding all those computer rankings doesn't make the ranking any more accurate because each of those computer rankings reflects a particular person's view of what factors should be taken into account in measuring the quality of a football program. In the end, it's really just the equivalent of one more vote.
That said, being informed of the objective figures could be helpful to some consumers. For example, average SAT scores may be really important to some. To others it may be job or graduate school placement success. In the end, all these schools are very prestigious as well as very difficult to get into. The decision of which one to attend will ultimately be personal to the student and his or her family.
