<p>more likely, we call them HYP because that is the order of their founding. if you read “the chosen” by jerome karabel, you’ll learn that cross-admit rates between the three have fluctuated a lot in the last century. harvard “pulled away” in this regard rather recently. its current edge over YP is clear and acknowledged, but i have never seen any numbers for Y vs. P except hints that the former’s edge over the latter is very narrow, if one exists at all.</p>
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<p>The three universities, when named together, are almost invariably named in the order Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. This could reflect their relative agetheir founding dates being 1636, 1701, and 1746, respectively[16]which in turn is an important point of institutional pride, since it governs the order in which the institutions march in academic processions.</p>
<p>Harvard is also the largest of the three by most measures, Yale second, and Princeton third, and other characteristics related to size have the same rank order.</p>
<p>It has been also been suggested that the name ordering is related to a famous school rivalry between Harvard and Yale, although a more prosaic explanation is simply that the original 1880s journalistic initialism was coined that way because this ordering is one that actually results in an initialism that is also an acronym, HYP, and it simply stuck.</p>
<p><a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(universities)[/url]”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(universities)</a></p>