What are the major pros and cons of Stanford, U Chicago, Princeton, Harvard and Yale?
Major con of those schools is they’re very very selective. Major pro is their financial aid will meet your need.
Anyone else? About any of these colleges, something that puts you off or make you attracted towards a certain school.
Worry- i don’t like California. So I prefer Yale over Stanford. You don’t like snow and cold so Chicago would be a non-starter for you.
How on earth is this a helpful exercise?
The biggest con is that they are all uber-selective. As for the many pros, well that is a matter of personal preference.
Pro of Harvard and Yale is the residential college system and the fact that students live on campus all four years. House/College life is very important and many activities are organized in those smaller communities. I like that they are located in cities. Many students seem to major in their extra-curricular activities some of which will also be valuable in the future. (This is especially true for the Harvard Lampoon and The Crimson, probably also for the literary magazine The Advocate.)
Princeton, con is the overly bucolic location (for me) but pro is that it is relatively easy to get to NYC. I don’t like the Eating clubs at Princeton, but the system is vastly improved over the way it was originally.
Con for Stanford for me is location in Silicon valley, its relative isolation from the surroundings and its too perfect campus. But I didn’t hesitate to suggest my CS kid apply there. It would have been a good fit for him. None of that was stuff he cared about.
OP,
given that all of these colleges reject 95% of all applicants , this exercise in making what is now nothing more than imaginary choices , is best done AFTER acceptance letters have been received .
And Stanford students also live on campus all 4 years .
I agree with the previous posters that you’re too worried and too hurry (yes, pun intended).
Let’s re-visit this when you’ve received acceptance letters from all of those.
Not all Yale students live on campus all 4 years. And there is technically no campus.
Based on the latest posts WorryHarry should be a major donor or a foreign dignitary or his son is an athlete recruited by all these colleges.
The numbers are more different than I thought. 99% of Harvard students live on campus, 84% of Yale students and 97% of Stanford students are on campus, some in frats or sororities. (25% belong to Greek organizations, but I don’t know if they all live in Greek houses.) At U of Chicago all freshman live on campus and about 50% after that choose to stay on campus.
Is WorryHurry’s kid applying to all of these for sure, or are they still honing the list?
At Stanford, fraternities, sororities, and some other non-dorm undergraduate housing like cooperatives are in on-campus houses. https://rde.stanford.edu/studenthousing/housing-options
As far as I can tell, about a quarter of the threads on College Confidential are about some version of this topic. Read a few of them.
The thing that’s a pro for all of them is that they all provide outstanding opportunities for a liberal arts education with fabulous resources. Students are lucky to attend any of them.
They all have slightly different characters and relationships to their surroundings, which can help you prefer one or the other but wind up mattering little if at all to the core educational experience. (The current obsessive entrepreneurial culture at Stanford may be an exception to that, in that a number of people feel it can interfere with the educational experience.) Chicago doesn’t really offer engineering, so it’s a bad place to go if you want to be an engineer.
My son is trying to pick one for his ED choice. He doesn’t want to go window shopping all over the country and not get accepted to any.
Stanford students are guaranteed to have the option to live on campus, and most choose to do so, particularly among undergrads. A small minority instead favor off campus apartments or renting houses (in groups). Freshman are required to live on campus. After Freshman year, housing selection is done by “the draw,” which is a lottery type system. The housing that requires the best draw numbers are often Row houses, which are on campus, but in many cases look and function more like off campus housing than a traditional dorm. Many are self-ops (students hire cook or other services) or co-ops (students cook and clean themselves). Many have unique themes (cultural, vegetarian, etc.). Also note that a good portion of students take more than 4 years. Nearly half of engineering school students choose to do a co-terminal masters, which on average takes 5 years to complete.
Seems like he needs to do a little more basic research on the schools.
Of the schools you list, only Chicago has ED (and does consider “level of applicant’s interest”). Chicago also has EA. Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have EA, but restrictive in that they do not want applicants to apply ED anywhere or EA to other private schools in the US (restrictions may vary; check each school to be sure).
We often say picking a college is like picking a date. Can we depict them as a young person? I think they are quite different.
“the overly bucolic location” Less so, today. But I lived there and found the town annoyingly limited. (Odd because school locations are usually of next to no significance for me.)
WorryHurry, what does YOUR SON know about these colleges, before he applies early??? I mean, without our input. How much are you just basing this on stats and aspirations? Because that won’t get you far.
Cons also depend on the major. Lots of opportunities for kids driven in the right ways, willing to put in the right efforts. And remember, that’s by their definitions, not some hs kid’s. They are all places to thrive, but one, imo, is much tougher on kids in X major than they realize (when just looking at stats, and the Holy Grail, prestige.)
Gotta tell us why he’s interested in those colleges (and he’ll need to effectively show it to them, too.) Not ask us.
Worryhurry,
If your SON has NO idea, at THIS late point, only 1 month before ED/ EA applications are DUE, then he should NOT be pushed into applying ANYWHERE early.
Is this the student who wants to avoid physics and is trying to game his high school’s class rank system to make valedictorian?