The point of bringing up endowment per student was tp show that Columbia is not “indisputably” ranked similar to HYPSM. Instead it depends on what metric you are ranking the colleges. And HYPSMC (C typically refers to Caltech) are the top 6 non-LACs when ranked by endowment per student, so endowment per student is a metric that correlates very well with the HYPSMC acronym.
Yes ranking colleges by endowment per student has little meaning and does not indicate one college must be better choice than the other. However, is there any other referenced ranking for which the same statement could not be made? For example, USNWR’s also has the top 6 as HYPSMC, but C = Chicago and Columbia, rather than Caltech. Is USNWR’s ranking the correct way to group HYPSMC, and the traditional definition of C = Caltech is wrong? Or is USNWR’s ranking just as arbitrary and unmeaningful as endowment per student?
Acronym usage on the forum is not an official rule. If you’d like to say HYPC to mean 4 of the 8 of the Ivies or HYPSMC to mean HYPSM + Chicago, anyone is free to do so. If enough people do so, maybe it will catch on. However, C is probably going to stand for Confusion given the number of highly selective private colleges that start with that letter. A forum member can guess what 5 colleges HYPSM represent, but it’s far less obvious that C stands for Columbia or Chicago; which largely defeats the purpose of using an acronym instead of typing the name out.