Some more in the "for what it's worth" category, and this is only my personal observation from several years ago. When my DD finished her junior year of high school, she went to Summer Seminar at USNA and from there we visited HYP. Impressions were as follows, though I realize that some of the impressions were from the cadre and they rotate through every two years. She loved USNA, especially the physical challenge and the camaraderie. She could easily see herself attending there. The downside was the limited ability to study overseas while in college and to pursue courses in her desired field of study, which is in the humanities. Visiting Harvard, the department head invited her to his office to visit for an hour and then gave her his home phone number to call if she had any further questions; I was greatly impressed as she was simply another of the tens of thousands of hopefuls and he knew nothing of her other than she was planning on applying to Harvard. The cadre assigned a midshipman to meet with her; he said the commute back and forth to MIT for ROTC was a pain (though Harvard has since provided zip cars to make this easier) and overall my impression was that Harvard has recognized ROTC but there is still only limited support and that being in ROTC is not of much help in admission. At Yale, she had the same treatment from the department head, including a home phone number, along with a museum tour to handle 3,000 year old artifacts. Again, they had never heard of her, only that she was planning on applying the following year. She met with some of the NROTC midshipmen and they were super friendly. She met with a LT at the NROTC unit and that did not go well as my DD wanted to either go USNA or the college program route, and the LT was not at all desirous of having someone in the unit not on scholarship, or at least applying for one after they arrived. But as Sab245 stated above, Yale seemed to not only recognize ROTC, but to genuinely want to grow the unit as well and she would not have to commute for ROTC classes. Next was Princeton. Even though she had tried in advance to get an appointment with someone in her field of study, there was no one in the department available to meet. At the time there was no NROTC so she visited AROTC. The LT she spoke with was the friendliest of the bunch, said that going non-scholarship was no problem, and there were lots of summer opportunities for training. The school seemed to have a long history of supporting ROTC. The downside was that she preferred navy over army. Each school had it's pros and cons, but most of them were unique to her. All of this is to say that there is no one school ideal for everyone, it depends upon each student's particular situation.