Stanford more prestigious? I don't think so.

phantasmagoric
Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:22:44 +0000

Stanford and Columbia don’t compare in layman’s prestige:

[Harvard Number One University in Eyes of Public](Harvard Number One University in Eyes of Public)

Notice that Stanford is second only to Harvard, whereas Columbia is mentioned by only 1% of the population, on par with NYU, Iowa, Purdue, etc.

Also, according to data released by Stanford, only about 12-13 students each year choose Columbia over Stanford. Although that doesn’t tell us a cross-admit %, it does shed light on the relative scarcity of those at Columbia who can claim they got into Stanford and turned it down. (Conversely, there’s a huge number of students at Stanford who can claim they turned down Columbia.)



Historically, that’s backwards. Columbia was one of the most prestigious schools in the first half of the 20th century and the postwar period, while Stanford didn’t become a nationally-known school until the late 1970s and 1980s (the same time when Columbia, and New York City more generally, were at their nadir).



I agree that the previous poster is confused in his/her understanding of the history of Stanford/Columbia, but this is equally wrong. Stanford rose to HYP-level with the rise of Silicon Valley, but it was already considered elite long before that. For example, in 1900, when the Association of American Universities was founded, there were 9 original private universities: HYPS, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, JHU, and Penn. (At the time Stanford was much richer than even Harvard or Columbia.) If you look up newspaper archives on Google, you can find very old college rankings from decades before Silicon Valley that place Stanford among the top 5 or top 10. So it was “nationally-known” very long before the 1970s.