Stanford students were proud, too, especially of their school’s (reputed) laid-back atmosphere. One alum called it “very creative and a little bit hipster.” Another marveled at “certain quirky things,” such as the fact that “[at] graduation they have neon, they’re wearing bikinis. At graduation!” On both campuses, students tended to believe that their schools’ sterling reputations were deserved.

A lot of the praise that students had for their schools, though, came implicitly, in the form of criticizing other campuses. The University of Pennsylvania—and, in particular, its business school, Wharton—was mentioned regularly as an example of what Harvard and Stanford proudly claimed not to be. Penn, in the view of these students, was too preprofessional. “I think people who pursue just a[n undergraduate] business degree, it’s like a signaling effect saying, ‘I don’t value learning for learning’s sake; I value education as a means to an end,’” said one recent Harvard graduate.

Other schools were looked down upon for other reasons—some for being too social, others for not being social enough. Some Harvard and Stanford students said they wouldn’t have fit in as well at Princeton (“It’s stiff”; “Everybody drinks too much”) or the University of Chicago (“Within five minutes, someone was trying to talk to me about Kant and, sort of, philosophy”). Meanwhile, there were plenty of well-regarded schools—such as Johns Hopkins and public universities like the University of California system and the University of Michigan—that none of the surveyed students brought up in conversation.

The colleges that these students had strong opinions about do have their own distinct cultures, but in the big picture, they are not so different. Binder notes that this pool of schools are all “incredibly selective,” “spend a lot of resources per pupil,” and have “very small” and “largely affluent student bod[ies]” who come from across the U.S. and the world. “In terms of how good the education is that students receive, they are basically the same on an objective scale,” she wrote to me in an email.

These interviews do not capture how all students at highly selective colleges generalize about students at similar schools, let alone how all students at just Harvard and Stanford do so. Still, Binder and Abel note that the 56 students’ beliefs were “highly convergent” and more or less consistent across gender, race, and socioeconomic background.

Binder and Abel have a theory for why many of these “elites-in-the-making” engage in such micro-comparisons (and, often, outright stereotyping): “By critiquing other campuses,” they write, “these students subtly elevate their own status and position.” If Princeton is regarded as too stiff, then Stanford is implied to be easygoing by comparison—and thus more deserving of renown.