The 12 Top Rivalries

Rivalry? What Rivalry? Ask our most famous colleges about their feuds with celebrated adversaries and they brush them off as no longer relevant in an open-minded, caring age of national unity. "Sir, we do not consider ourselves rivals with our sister academies except on the fields of friendly strifes," says West Point spokesman Francis J. DeMaro Jr.Annapolis spokeswoman Deborah Goode has the same earnest message: "We support each other and our nation on the front lines of the global War on Terror."

And they're not the only ones. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Notre Dame and others also don't want to talk about stolen school mascots, insults spray-painted on campus statues or anything else that smacks of the old grudges. In academia these days, such seeming hatreds of any kind are considered unfashionable and maybe even illegal in a few instances. But intense competition between high-quality institutions—what most people would call rivalry—still has importance in the college-admissions process. These rivals (OK, pick a friendlier word: competitors? counterparts? bosom buddies?) are continually trying to differentiate themselves for applicants who wonder which of two or three very similar and high-performing schools might be best for them.

We've picked 11 pairs and one trio of colleges whose strengths are so great and resemblances so compelling that careful comparison is necessary to sort out which schools work best for which applicants. It's also a bit of a guilty pleasure just to marvel at how deeply embedded many of the rivalries are. Some of the rivals have been associated in the public mind for more than a century, like Michigan and Ohio State, and some are as recent as digital movie cameras and multiplexes, like the film schools at USC and NYU.

But in every case, no matter what the schools' press releases say, students, faculty and alumni feel as if they're in competition with one another. Like most successful American institutions, that turns out to be one of their strengths. Herewith, the top 12 rivalries at U.S. colleges:

Old Ivies: Harvard vs. Yale
Gila Reinstein, spokeswoman for Yale, says "the Yale-Harvard rivalry is not substantial enough to merit attention." But many of the 6,600 undergraduates at Harvard and the 5,300 (set to grow to 6,000 by 2013) at Yale would disagree. There is a reason that Montgomery Burns, the most loathsome character on the TV comedy "The Simpsons," displays his Yale pedigree: many of the writers are graduates of The Harvard Lampoon humor magazine. There is a reason that many Yale graduates note, not bragging or anything, that every U.S. president since 1988 has had a degree from their New Haven, Conn., alma mater, and express some concern for the country since the last Bulldog candidate with a chance, Hillary Rodham Clinton, J.D. '73, pulled out of the race.

Harvard is the oldest and Yale the third oldest college in the country. Most years they are among the most difficult to get into, with acceptance rates around 8 percent. They rank first (Harvard's $35 billion) and second (Yale's $23 billion) in the size of their endowments, and have both made strides to remove costs for low-income students so that their lovely brick buildings won't look so much like bastions of the upper-middle class. But they also have world-class professors and students who thrive by challenging each other. Their residential houses were designed and funded by the same man, Yale graduate Edward Harkness, who discovered Harvard was quicker to accept his gift. His design is still envied as a model for undergraduate life.