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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Princeton at the top of HYP for undergrad for one really important reason:
there are virtually no graduate students, which means you actually have contact with your professors.

They teach the classes, teach most of the sections, teach seminars, and advise you on your junior paper and senior thesis.  I also liked having the diversity of the Engineering school (which in addition to having a lot of kids who are smart in a way that I respect and learned to kind of understand, skews the male female ratio in favor of females).

You can develop relationships with professors at Harvard and Yale, but you have to stand out and be extremely self confident like my siblings, who had professors asking them out to lunch.  That would not have happened to me at Harvard.  I would have gotten lost.

Instead I got to be one of 12 students in a seminar taught by Maya Angelou where I was forced to speak and she actually listened and respected what I had to say, which blew my mind.  The same was true of some other famous professors outside of my major.

Princeton is also small - so you don't get lost socially either.  I came from a small private school and, as I said, was not the most confident person in the world.  The needs blinds admissions means that it is an incredibly diverse environment and you can learn a lot about people who come from completely different backgrounds if you make the effort.

And finally Princeton is in a rural area.  Harvard is also in a safe area, but a city.  Yale and Columbia are not located in safe areas.  But at Princeton there is not much you can get distracted by, and the only people you have to fear being assaulted by are male students (and, like at any other college, THAT is no joke).

My sibs also had great college experiences, but I was less confident about my intellectual prowess and would never have had the courage to develop the relationships with my professors that I did at Princeton.  I also don't think I would have gone so far out of my comfort zone in terms of the friends I made, who have become friends for life, had I been at a larger school feeling lost - I would have just gravitated towards people who were familiar to me, like me..........[/quote]

Maybe this has changed, but when I was there, Princeton artificially deflated its grad student numbers by counting PhD candidates as enrolled only during their first 4 years of study.  Mean time to a Princeton PhD at that time was 7.9  years IIRC.   Basically, about  half the actual grad students went uncounted in Princeton's statistics.  Even as a first year grad student at Princeton, I precepted (aka taught sections in) an upper division course.  And, in my department, fifth-year grad students routinely advised senior theses.  We were classified as faculty (hired as adjunct instructors or lecturers), but we were all ABDs.  Actually, compared to Harvard, the grad students teaching at Princeton were less advanced.  In each school, some grad students were great teachers and others didn't know WTF they were doing.

Abstractly, I agree with what PP is saying (Princeton may be a better choice for a really smart but shy or not so self-confident student than Harvard would be), but I also know that I had close relationships with a number of my Harvard profs and small classes with many others.  And I was surprised and put off by the undergrad social scene at Princeton when I arrived.  It was really alcoholic and not very intellectual.  Harvard's social life and student body seemed much more diverse by comparison.  Maybe that's changed too, but it's definitely worth having a DC visit both places, talk to friends/former classmates at each, and ask questions about instruction in specific majors.[/quote]

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