<p>No I did not attend Carleton. I spent a year at Penn and graduated from Northwestern. I only looked at this site because I have a family member asking my advice. GO27 I clearly stated that no one should pick any school based on exact ranking and I never said that Brandeis was anything other than a very good top 35 school. But you high schoolers are fooling yourselves if you don’t think that some schools are better than others. The student bodies of elite schools are very different from the good schools because of the overall quality of the students. You are also fooling yourself if you think that lots of students turn down ivy schools to attend schools like the ones on your list(even Carleton). I went to a very large high school and went to good colleges and met no one at Penn or NW that turned down HPYS. There are many reasons to attend slightly lesser schools such as better FA, location, or playing varsity sports but overall most high school students attend the best schools(within a range of 5-10 schools) to which they are admitted. Go look at your own high schools and try to find the students admitted to the top 10 or 15 that choose to attend much lower ranked schools. Now B77 says that I choose the USNWR Rankings because it favors Carleton. This is nonsense. The USNWR rankings are the most influential because they stand up to scrutiny and are accepted by most educated people to be relatively accurate. As I stated before one can argue about the rankings by 5 or even 10 places but do you really want to claim that Penn is 61st , Cornell 71st, and Duke 80th. GO27 you should certainly go where ever you feel most comfortable regardless of ranking but that would be based on your personal choice not the overall quality of the schools on your list. Based on quality Carleton and Brandeis are head and shoulders above the other schools</p>