<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.</p>