<p>Agreed on Yale, Penn, Columbia, Chicago. Not sure on Stanford. I’d probably say Princeton is closer to Harvard than Stanford.</p>
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<p>I haven’t attended either of course, but right, I am surprised people compare the two. For one thing, a huge, huge subset of MIT is into applied things, from what some of the MIT posters have said (along with anyone I know who went there). I guess the reason I think so much of Harvard is its math program, and that’s probably geared very much towards theoretical things. While MIT has a good pure math program too, I think the student body at Harvard doing something in the sciences, math, (engineering??) is far less likely to do engineering. The atmospheres seem highly different.</p>
<p>If a new species is found today, Harvard would try to find out where it came from; MIT would try to find out the structure of it; Stanford would try to find a way to make money out of it, … and I would try to find out the taste of it.</p>
<p>That is how similar or different they are. Oh, Princeton and Yale would try to watch what is happening?</p>