newkid, I agree with what you are saying for the most part, but how do you leave Cal-tech off your list? Poly tech? both are excellent schools. You and I might have different rankings, but I like to use salary for my ranking since it is not subjective.
Either way Stanford must do an excellent job of marketing because my perception is that they are superior to Cal even though research might prove otherwise. That said if I had to pick one school for engineering it would be MIT, for business it would be Stanford, for Finance Columbia and for an MBA or law degree it would be Harvard but I am doing just fine with my CU degree.
Cal Tech is an elite school, with out a doubt. I could have mentioned it, i didn't mainly for the same reasons most people don't really talk about it. It's an insanely small school with a very small core concentration. Hell, I grew up in Brentwood and new almost nothing about it. It also has one of the most self selective applicant pools. Cal tech is not really many people's dream school. You probably go there because you are already working on research in a particular field and have a specific mentor in mind you want to work with. It's sort of apples to oranges. Though they may be exquisite apples.
As far as Stanford, I'm not so sure that it's marketing as much as it is exclusivity. If you are as good as Cal or Stanford you are already on a different level, now, if you also happen to be very small, which Stanford is, you are instantly more exclusive.
Rankings based on salary are good in theory. It only really works if you look at it on a program by program basis. And even then, it's tricky. If you have a smaller school like Caltech, your median is bound to be higher than say even Harvard. But that's because you have Harvard grads in the social sciences bringing down the numbers, where as Caltech only spits out scientist. Also, if you are comparing schools like Dartmouth, bastions of nepotism and old money, with a school like Michigan, which is a vastly superior research institution and has more top 10 programs, you will still get misleading numbers. The Dartmouth grad even from a similar program, with even the most meaningless major stands to earn a lot more money, a lot sooner. Reason being he/she probably comes from it. But if you want another list, Berkeley is 9th in most Billionaires produced. Admittedly, Stanford is 2nd. I believe the only other P12 school in the top 20 is USC. This according to Forbes.
Realistically, I think US News
is the main reason for the perceived gap between Stanford and Berkeley. The average soccer mom helping her kid fill out apps is far more likely to read that list, than look at zfacts and real world numbers. The only major difference I've seen between the two undergrads: if you want few distractions and be guaranteed good grades, go to Stanford, they have the resources to ensure that you do. If you want to be prepared for the real world, in every sense possible, go to Berkeley. At the graduate level, there is no difference. Berkeley grad programs are filled with Stanford grads, and ditto for Stanford grad programs.
Personally, after I narrowed down my college choices to two Ivies and Berkeley I chose Berkeley because I wanted a real "college town" experience. For that same reason, I never applied to Stanford, but I can definitely see why others would. When I applied to graduate school, Cal and MIT were the top 2 programs in my field, I didn't apply to MIT because I'd always thought it was a terrible campus, plus I always saw Cambridge as Berkeley 2.0 with bad weather and more republicans (not that its a bad thing). So I opted to go to Columbia mainly because I wanted to live in NYC, even though the program there was ranked in the high teens. I'm pretty happy with my choices and feel I got the best of both worlds.
