It looks like Stanford has been gaining as the preeminent school in the USA. Almost all ranking league tables except USNews, has ranked it above Harvard.
Here’s another ranking which shows Stanford beating Harvard as dream the school for both students and parents.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/18/princeton-review-dream-colleges-2015_n_6886526.html
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If you’re given the choice to pick one between Stanford and Harvard, which school would you choose?
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You have a poor grasp of judgement if u think there is an objective, significant quality distinction between these 2 schools ranked by subjective measures. It’s like stating authoritatively that a ski vacation in Chamonix is better than a beach vacation in St. Tropez.
Its a fad. Stanford has become the new cool. Maybe in the next decade it would be some other college. But what will not change after 10 years is that both Stanford and Harvard would remain world class educational institutions. The appeal depends on changing eras. In an era where software is driving the world Stanford has taken over. In the century, American polity drove most of the world, Harvard and Yale reigned supreme. It all depends on the circumstances. Appeal is a very subjective thing.
@GMTplus7, I don’t think the question is whether or not Stanford has become objectively better than Harvard (impossible to tell, and irrelevant anyway). The question instead is whether Stanford has replaced Harvard as the number-one, pie-in-the-sky “dream college” of elite/high-achieving college students. It used to be that the gold standard for admission/attendance was Harvard; I remember kids in my high school class applying to Harvard just to say they were admitted there (even if they had no intention of attending).
I don’t think it’s quite a zero sum game, though, in which Harvard has “lost” appeal to Stanford. Harvard is just as appealing as it always has been. However, I do think that in recent years Stanford has risen, and IMO that’s for two major reasons:
The Internet. In days past students applied to the colleges they’d heard about - through friends, family members, their schools, and the glossies sent to them in the mail. Since the East Coast (and the Northeast in particular) has a very large concentration of elite prep schools and wealthy public high schools where larger numbers of students go to top schools, it makes sense that back them Harvard was more the dream - more kids would’ve heard of it than Stanford. But with the advent of the Internet and the Common App, more kids - even East Coast prep school kids - have heard of Stanford through forums like these and other means.
The tech boom. Stanford is well-known for its tech grads and its connections to Silicon Valley and the West Coast tech world. Harvard is more known for connections to Wall Street and similar businesses. From the 1980s through the early 2000s, the feather-in-the-cap job for recent graduates was Wall Street. I went to college in 2004 and I remember that was the gold-standard, elite-job goal - to go to Wall Street and work for Lehman Brothers (ha!) or Merrill Lynch (ha!) or Chase or JP Morgan (which were separate entities back then!). On the other hand, Google was just 6 years old and was only a search engine; YouTube was nascent and there were no ads on it; Facebook was just a network some Harvard kid started a year or so ago; and there was no such thing as Instagram, Tumblr, Venmo, an iPhone, Uber…etc. I didn’t even send a text message until my junior year in college, and I’m only 28. Harvard sends a lot of graduates to Wall Street, so it stood to reason that kids with upper-middle-class dreams would want to go to Harvard, because the way to those dreams was then the financial industry. No one expected banks to fail!
Well, they did, and in their wake the new hot jobs of the economy were engineering and tech-related jobs. Tech start-ups proliferated, Google and Facebook and Twitter blew up and enriched their young founders, and investors were largely pumping money into tech start-ups instead of other things (like real estate…ha!). Kids with upper-middle-class dreams now choose engineering, computer science, and statistics majors instead of just finance or economics. So it stands to reason that in the 10+ years since I started college the new hot pie-in-the-sky dream choice is Stanford, since Stanford is most intricately connected mentally with the Silicon Valley tech-start-up business in many students’ minds.
As Juliet said it all depends on what you want to study. If it’s CS then Stanford is the new king or rather kingmaker, though certainly not exclusively. Harvard’s CS program is ranked a lowly #18, in spite of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Tony Hsieh (Zappo). I would argue that outside of CS, MIT, Caltech and Harvey Mudd are better engineering schools than Stanford.
But if your goal is to go work on Wall Street or Capitol hill, then Harvard is still the school(as well as Yale, Princeton, Georgetown). And actually, the techies in SV still need the finance guys who run all the venture capital firms and investment banks back east to do their IPOs. Tech and finance form a symbiosis, as much as techies often disdain the vampire squids of Wall Street.
I agree with @juillet that “Stanford has replaced Harvard as the number-one, pie-in-the-sky “dream college” of elite/high-achieving college students.” My D is a senior and I remember when she finished 5th grade and her elementary school yearbook surveyed the 5th graders about their goals for the future (not what college). About a third of the class said “Go to Stanford.” These were 5th graders. One of her former 5th grade classmates (now a high school classmate) has been admitted to Stanford SCEA, and he is a high stats first generation applicant. I’m a Stanford alum and last year I expected that when the time came, my high stats D would apply Stanford SCEA. But she preferred Pomona for fit and got in there ED1 and is very happy. To answer the OP, if I had to pick, I’d pick my alma mater Stanford over Harvard. But having gone there and now having gone through the college search process, I know that as awesome as Stanford is, it’s definitely not the best choice for everyone.
JoanneB, but according to the recently published, US News&WR Best Business Schools, Stanford is number one. It has been ranked number 1 for seven years since 10 years ago.
This is like comparing a Ferrari to a Lamborghini - pointless.
That being said, Stanford’s in wine country 
Actually, it’s not.
Both schools are very different. East vs West. Cold vs Sunshine. Liberal arts-focused vs science/tech/entrep focused. etc…
Stanford has no weaknesses in its offerings; virutally all of its departments are top five/ten. Harvard cannot make the same claim.
I suspect that a great deal of Stanford’s current cachet among some observers stems from two related factors: first, its association with Silicon Valley and the nouveau riche class whose riches are founded in hi-tech; second, a West-coast location that makes it more “visible” to aspiring students in Asia, whose preferences have a not inconsiderable influence on the attitudes of many Americans about the US educational system. Harvard’s historical excellence across the board means little to young people who grew up in cyberspace, who regard last year as “ancient history,” and who aspire to entrepreneurial grandeur in the computer biz.
I’ll bite. Harvard for me – I greatly prefer Harvard’s location and weather, and it’s relatively decent in my academic discipline with some impressive resources. Stanford had only one professor who did kinda-sorta related work, and they lost him to Yale. For that matter, there’s quite a few universities I’d pick over Stanford (Penn, Cornell, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Brown, Yale, etc.).
95% of the kids on here are convinced they want to go into engineering or CS, and at least half are also interested in business and entrepeneurship. I’m not at all surprised they’re hot to trot about Stanford. Stanford has always been a school of the times.
The Harvard vs. Stanford threads have shown up over and over and over and over for over 10 years at this site. It is a silly argument to keep having. They are both awesome institutions. 30% of folks accepted to Stanford actually choose someplace else…for Harvard, that number is around 20%. The actual number isn’t important… but it illustrates that people do indeed turn down Stanford and Harvard. For students admitted to both Harvard and Stanford, students generally choose Harvard 2-1… for students admitted to both Stanford and Yale, they split 50-50. Stanford beats out all other competitors for cross admits.
For the record, in my field (astronomy & astrophysics), Stanford is not great (has only a few professors), whereas Berkeley across the Bay is top 3.
At the graduate level, Berkeley is certainly on the same level as Harvard and Stanford.
“At the graduate level, Berkeley is certainly on the same level as Harvard and Stanford.”
Totally agree!
harvard has a name no doubt! it is seen a s the golden ticket. and it appeals to a certain type of student (those who need validation by going to the top blue chip) the school itself does not have more to offer than tons of other schools, but it has the name and for those who need that validation they apply and obsess over getting in. stanford is a younger version of Harvard and appeals to a lot of competitive students too. I would say the dream of attending either school is silly. so many people mismatch the school they go to based on the name game and “rep”. I guess it is human nature.
Must be regional. We’re on the East Coast and I doubt if any of the 5th graders in my kids’ school even know what Stanford is. Pretty sure they’ve heard of Harvard and Yale.
By MS when they start thinking about college then they hear about it.
I’d recommend a good LAC over each to my own kids. At the grad level, it depends on the dept.
For my kids on the east coast, HYP over Stanford hands down. They are not interested in CS anyway.
zobroward, not all students that go to these schools need validation nor are silly for wanting to go there. Maybe these schools are not for everyone, but not everyone that goes there fit the stereotype of being obsessed, silly dreamers, and in need of validation. A lot of these students are just regular kids that feel quite humble and fortunate to be there, studying their asses off, making the most of their college years like everyone else.
I don’t know where you got those data. None of them are true except Harvard’s yield is about 81%.
Your kids are really unlike mine, except my son was not interested in CS neither. He wanted to work for Google when he was in high school and he got his wish, and he did not major CS in college. He was also admitted by one of HYP and he did not go.
It is only true telling when you have the choices to decide. Of course, for us, we can all imagine what we could do.
It is projected that Stanford’s admit rate will be at around 4.8% this year, but we have to see.