First, congrats to your son!
I have a kid at MIT and visited Yale twice with two kids. But MIT is a great college, excellent award winning detachment, and a fantastic place to go to a college.
Yale and MIT offer different atmospheres. Yale is a very cool campus (especially the colleges where kids live and a great assortment of food trucks), but in a small town with some iffy areas around (though safe).
MIT is in Cambridge/Boston which has an urban feel but it definitely also offers a campus feel. And Boston is a great place to go to school - 1 in 5 people are college students, kids get an urban feel by going out for pizza safely at 1 am (not something you can do at USNA), taking the T to a museum/restaurants/other schools, etc.
As for detachments, MIT has won top small school detachment over the last few years. They also host Harvard, Tufts, and Wellesley so it is filled with high achieving cadets.
MIT is ranked in many polls as the #1 school in the country/world but Yale is obviously right up there. Fantastic programs that will offer your son a great experience with excellent education and diverse student/cultural thoughts (good opportunties to meet peers who think differently and have debates over beers
). As respects Physics/Math, MIT might be the better place for that major though. This site offers good info on colleges and their program rankings:
https://www.topuniversities.com/uni...ubject-rankings/top-universities-physics-2020
I offer all this in my humble opinion. But this is a choice where your son really needs to visit the campuses and see which setting he prefers, especially if he is going to be comparing to USNA and the student lifestyle there. In the end, my kids went with the normal college experience over the academy style. It's a huge difference that your son really needs to think about. I know we have a diversity of thought on this board, but I think you should switch your last comment to: will USNA give MIT and Yale good competition.
Good luck!
- feel free to message me if you have any other questions on the above