Well let’s have fun, then. I’m a bit in my cups (0.10 or so but not driving…) - usually I post sober as a judge at work. hehe
If they were people…
Princeton would be Einstein
Harvard would be JFK
Yale would be Meryl Streep
Stanford would be Ted Hoff (inventor of the microprocessor – no small feat)
MIT would be Buzz Aldrin
And the University of Wisconsin would be John Muir.
Obviously all of these schools have many famous alumni and professors, so sometimes it’s hard to choose one to yield a superficial/hyped identity; none of them is so simple in focus or range of quality. in fact, looking at their alumni lists, each school has produced a whole lot of famous folks spanning many vocations and aims.
But fur fun, they will do. To me, at least.
Hey, this is a thread about prestige. So while that is a bad reason to choose a school, the reasons for the prestige aren’t typically bogus.
Interesting selection
I’ll note that many of these people went to those schools for graduate studies, not undergraduate like OP. And Einstein’s connection to Princeton University is that… he lived in the same town?
Harvard is the most famous. After that Princeton, Yale, MIT and Stanford are considered comparably prestigious to Harvard. You’re splitting hairs to try and parse it further. For a subset interested in certain STEM fields, MIT is probably their dream school. But there’s no employer or grad program that wouldn’t consider with equal weight the grads of MIT and not of Princeton (unless it’s personal to the hiring manager). And there’s no one in the universe who would hear that someone went to MIT and think, “huh, couldn’t get into Princeton I guess” or vice versa.
One thing that might actually be relevant to this thread: A number of years ago I tried to make a list of the 10 smartest and most accomplished people I had ever met. Several were for example professors at either MIT or Stanford. One was a Supreme Court justice that I just happened to sit next to on an airplane flight. Some had done very well in high tech. I ended up with 14 people on the list and was not able to trim it down further.
Somewhat surprisingly, the 14 people had attended 14 different universities for their bachelor’s degree. One (an MIT professor who was one of the top leading experts in Artificial Intelligence) had gotten their bachelor’s degree at the University of the Witwatersrand. I can guarantee that I had never heard of that school before the Internet came along and I was able to Google the particular professor.
Since then I have, at least in my mind, added two more people to the list. This also happen to add 2 more undergraduate universities to the list.
I had expected that just by coincidence at least two out of sixteen might have attended the same university. Nope.
Really smart people attend a very wide range of universities for a very wide range of reasons. MIT and Princeton are on the list. So apparently is the University of the Witwatersrand and a long list of other schools.
Which might agree with the comment above: “Why would it matter?”.
Perhaps one aspect of admissions matches these differences: Princeton uses legacy in admissions, while MIT does not.
On a different college prestige subject, once, another person at work (who graduated from a state flagship in the northeastern part of the US) was impressed by an applicant having graduated from an Ivy League school. My comment was that “he must have been smarter than you in high school”.
MIT is the more prestigious (since we are in a high-tech world). But, if I find a Princeton grad who can teach me how to use all of the features on my flip-phone, my opinion could change.
