Stanford became Harvard.

Was there a point in recent memory where it wasn’t? As a non-American I’d always considered them to be the Oxford and Cambridge (respectively) of the US.

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andrewl 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Some would say Harvard and Yale are the Oxford and Cambridge of the US. But we’re a big country, and we have a lot of schools. Many lists of top schools include these, alphabetically ordered:

Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Rice University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Yale University

But this discussion of rankings reminds me of a quote from John Allen Paulos:

In fact, trying to convert a partial ordering into a total one is, I think, at the root of many problems. Reducing intelligence to a linear ordering—a number on an IQ scale—does violence to the complexity and incomparabilities of people’s gifts.

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JKCalhoun 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They're West coast. "Elite" schools in the U.S. are typically East coast (old monied).

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chasd00 6 days ago | parent [-]

Just want to point out that “old money” in the USA is a different thing than “old money” in Europe. The whole USA is only around 350 years old.

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EFreethought 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Some of the American old money came from European old money.

	▲	adastra22 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Very, very few. Those were mostly loyalists and left in 1776.

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6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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adastra22 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That would be Harvard - MIT.

But Stanford is in the same league for sure.

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onetimeusename 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

They all became each other. The second (or maybe first) most popular degree at Harvard now is CS. Students apply to all the Ivy+ schools and a few backup options, maybe 20 in total, and you pick the best one you get accepted to. All the students have done the same things, they have very similar GPAs and scores, they all mostly went to Ivy feeder high schools, they do all the same extra curriculars like math and CS club and teaching underprivileged kids to code. It's all the same. Maybe they are more easily distinguished for grad school.