I'm a current high school senior looking down the road towards eventual PhD admissions. I was admitted to both CMU and Cornell for CS undergrad and I'm having a tough time deciding between them. CMU is obviously the better school for computer science, but I prefer Cornell's campus and general culture. The one thing that would make me choose Cornell is if CMU and Cornell are close enough that which one I choose won't effect my chance of admission to a top CS PhD program.
My area of interest is foundational AI/ML research (I know it's a little early to determine that but that's what I find most interesting). In favour of CMU is the fact that they have roughly double the output at NeurIPS as per csrankings.org. They also have about double the faculty, and all of that is while Cornell has about double the CS students as CMU. That totals to 4x as much competition for research opportunities. However, that might not matter if research opportunities are so plentiful that its pretty much the same at both.
An interesting argument in favour of Cornell is that they win a lot more CRA Undergraduate Research Awards (~20 vs 5 this year albeit with twice as many students). This could entail that while CMU is better for PhD research, Cornell is better at undergraduate research.
My main question really is whether there is anything significant I would lose by choosing Cornell over CMU. If the answer is yes, I'll choose CMU. However, if PhD admissions are more about the student independent of the institution, then I'll probably choose Cornell. I've got two days to decide so any help with my decision would be much appreciated!