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> Stanford is surely the most prestigious general-purpose university west of, well, Harvard.

Is that no longer Yale? From the perspective of someone who had a rather poor exposure to universities during my high school years—so, precisely what someone gets from pop-culture and osmosis without anyone in particular acting as a guide—my impression was that Harvard and Yale were unambiguously the Big Two, and everything else fell somewhere after them in terms of recognition and prestige.

Is this a CS perspective? I hear a lot about Stanford's CS program so I assume it's notably good.

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I've seen a few places that Stanford and Harvard are close to 50/50 on cross admits now, and that Stanford has even passed Harvard a few times (which no school has ever done). Likely a lot to do with press around Stanford students becoming rich Silicon Valley founders. My original point is that there has been a lot of changes in how students perceive schools that may not get reflected in the US News ratings.

Interesting! My impressions were formed some time ago, so I'm not surprised they're out of date. Thanks.

I think Stanford is viewed as having eclipsed Yale and is competitive with Harvard. Princeton probably also eclipses Yale.

Insider who worked with a lot of schools: Yale is a much, much better school than Stanford. Stanford beats Yale on hype.

A lot of the elites are hype-over-substance, and it's often hard for a naive audience to screen out which ones.

It makes more sense to me that east-coast schools would show an artificial advantage on "revealed preference" type rankings, because more Americans live closer to the east coast schools. They're more "locally" well-known, you're closer to home (okay, a disadvantage for some), etc. I'd expect them to benefit more from hype than Stanford would.

And they're older and have had longer to work their way into the culture. Many of the eastern ivy league schools are older than the USA. Some are even older than the state they're in (in the east, unlike in the west, states are often a little older than the USA itself, rather than a litlte newer)

Stanford certainly beats Yale in CS quality both in terms of peers and instruction.

I have significant experience with HYP, less-so with Stanford. I don't think I am a naive audience, I know many people from these schools and have attended classes, either due to being a student there or online videos in the case of Stanford & Princeton.

True, but CS isn't everything. Stanford is definitely much more of a tech school than Yale.

I'd never have gone to Yale because it was a poor fit for my interests. That's different from being a poor school. Overall school quality is less important than fit. Given my interests, I would have pick Stanford over Yale (and in turn pick Caltech, CMU, or Georgia Tech over Stanford).

That said, Yale is a phenomenal experience. It's very academic in the classic sense -- deep, philosophical discussions, and thoughtfully exploring topics in a way that's increasingly rare in the fast-paced elites. It gives a lot of what people assume they'll get out of a small liberal arts college (which is different from the reality; most small liberal arts colleges are expensive and horrible).

I have little knowledge or Princeton. I know both Harvard and Stanford in great depth.

Yeah, there’s some “new gold rush money” thinking going on in this thread. Harvard has had 5 US Presidents. Yale has had 3. Stanford has had just one. Not a single Supreme Court justice went to Stanford. 4 went to Yale and 4 went to Harvard.

Stanford tied with Harvard for 6 Senators in the 117th Congress, impressively, but obviously Harvard dominates that metric over a longer time.

Harvard still has more than twice as many billionaire alumni notwithstanding how many billionaires these days are in the tech industry.

Not taking a side on this, but those are all heavily lagging indicators. IE, those are all almost 30 years after college. The current ranking can be highly different from what it was a generation ago.

You are quite wrong about the Stanford supreme court justices: Sandra Day O'Connor and Stephen Breyer

He's talking about Law School of course - that's where promising students are drafted into the Supreme Court clerk position that's the first step on the cursus honorum to becoming a Supreme Court Justice. Undergrad doesn't matter as much except inasmuch it gets you into the prestigious law schools.

Um, Sandra Day O'Connor went to Stanford for undergrad and law school.

Also, this is a thread that's largely about undergrad, so I'm not sure Rayiner was talking about law school.

There are different rankings for law schools, and Yale has been considered the most prestigious for many years. I think SLS nabbed the top spot various times in the last decade, but Harvard is definitely not the uncontested leader in law schools.

Sorry I meant current Justice. I thought that was clear from the count (4 Harvard, 4 Yale, 1 ND).

You're forgetting Princeton, which is almost always grouped together with Harvard and Yale to form "the Big Three"[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(colleges)

Fair point. I would guess there would be some people who would choose Yale over Stanford, and vice-versa. It probably depends mostly on which coast you want to be on, and if you prefer a very old institution or one that is much younger.

Yale also has a beautiful campus and a nice Oxford-style college/residential system. I didn't attend, but was somewhat jealous.

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