<p>PurpleTitan,</p>
<p>Harvard and Stanford are Harvard and Stanford. I have nothing to say about them.</p>
<p>The number of qualified applications is irrelevant. A good candidate can attend many other schools. If Yale expands, enrollment in its popular majors will rise, demand for its popular classes will rise, resources will be overtaxed… The school doesn’t seem to have a good plan to deal with those issues. I’m not on the Yale forum, so I’ll leave it at that.</p>
<p>Belittling the awareness and sophistication of others does not strengthen your argument. You are not the only one on these boards who does that.</p>
<p>Note:</p>
<p>Harvard has the highest Social Science PhD production rate among universities in Reed’s most recent listing.</p>
<p><a href=“Doctoral Degree Productivity - Institutional Research - Reed College”>http://www.reed.edu/ir/phd.html</a></p>
<p>Columbia, despite its Core and locale, is probably not closer to UChicago than the other Ivies are. I’d say Yale is (or was) the closest: residential house system, not in soul-sucking NYC, similar PhD production rates to Chicago’s, strong Humanities tilt, more than one interdisciplinary Humanities and Social Sciences program for undergraduates, and according to anecdotes I’ve heard, an intellectual vibrancy that’s only a tad more toned-down than Chicago’s. Princeton might work too, but it’s not in a city or a short walk from a city. </p>
<p>OP,</p>
<p>Columbia is in New York. I wouldn’t say that its campus is dead, but a good chance exists that if you go there, your college experience will be more about the city than about the school. (I went there for two years.)</p>