<p>I agree that Stanford is in a different league than Columbia, with 28,000 students and the laowest endowmnet per student in the Ivies, and Chicago, which is a great liberal arts university that is not distinguished in the physical sciences and has no engineering or solid computer science program. Based on student choices, faculty retention and hiring and fundraising/reserach prowess, it is Stanford and Harvard in a league of their own among the other top tier schools. Columbia does not even release their Common Set Data, so who knows if what they submit to USNews is even accurate.</p>