[jdm2212]

Georgetown has the School of Foreign Service, which has tougher admissions standards than the other 3 Georgetown undergraduate schools, and is the #2 ranked undergraduate program in blah blah blah but seriously the number of people who turned down Harvard for Georgetown SFS was very small, whereas the number of people in the SFS with a big chip on their shoulder because they didn't get into Harvard was very large. (I, personally, did not get turned down by Harvard because I had zero chance of getting in and so did not waste any money on filing an application and was happy to even get admitted to Georgetown.)

[jchonphoenix]

CMU is the same. The School of Computer Science had an an undergraduate admit rate 1 or 2% higher than Princeton when I attended. But agree that I only saw a handful of students at CMU who were accepted into MIT or Stanford. And they usually had scholarships or other reasons to attend.