<p>@whoever is debating
Kinda supporting what admissionsgeek wrote:</p>
<p>When I first moved to the U.S., I’ve never heard of Columbia. I only later knew about it because someone told me there was something called the ivy league and Columbia is one of the elite college there and offers unbelievable financial aid (as do all other ivies). I would never have applied to Columbia if it wasn’t on the Common App, yet I kinda view myself as “intelligent” (pretty good scores, tons of APs, made websites for people, etc).</p>
<p>Honestly, schools with no common app are just a pain to apply to. It’s very difficult to have get a teacher to write a separate recommendation JUST for the school (not to mention a separate application),
so I tend to stay away from the Uncommon-app schools.</p>
<p>There was an argument earlier about the rise and fall of NYC, which I completely don’t understand. I think you strongly underestimate the importance of NYC. When people say NYC is the center of the world, they aren’t kidding. It would take a lot to change that.</p>
<p>Also, if anything, people should now be more interested in Columbia. Morningside Heights has improved DRASTICALLY over the past fifty or so years. Columbia used to be stationed in a ghetto, and it was actually really dangerous. Now, Morningside Heights has been cleaned up a lot-- largely due to Columbia-- and it is one of the safer parts of the city. NYC is actually becoming one of the safest cities in the country. It has really cleaned itself up, and not just around Columbia-- everywhere. </p>
<p>NYC is going nowhere but up.</p>
<p>AND, on top of that, the other HYPSM college’s cities are anything but safe.
New Haven, CT (for Yale): 18th most dangerous city.
San Fransisco, CA (for Stanford): 130th most dangerous city.
Boston, MA (for MIT): 113th most dangerous city
Cambridge, MA (for Harvard): 279th most dangerous city
New York, NY (for Columbia): 269th most dangerous city</p>
<p>The only city that has any sort of competition is Harvard (Princeton was not listed because it’s not located in a city). The other cities are WAY more dangerous than Columbia, and it’s silly to think that Columbia doesn’t offer a safe atmosphere compared to HYPSM. I understand that people are still clinging onto the old stereotype that NYC is a very dangerous place, but as years pass people will come to accept that NYC is a very SAFE place. This will only help Columbia.</p>
<p>So, regarding safety of cities, Columbia will only benefit.</p>
<p>Morningside heights is certainly nicer and safer than it was a few decades ago. But to characterize it back then as “stationed in a ghetto” and “really dangerous” is completely off the mark. It’s never been in a ghetto or really dangerous.</p>
<p>Stanford isn’t in San Francisco or even near it. If you’re going to do that, you might as well list Princeton along with New York or Philadelphia (about the same distance).</p>
<p>I disagree with your comment about Morningside Heights. Both my parents lived there for almost 20 years (my father attended Columbia undergrad, grad, and then did paid research for them), and that’s what they’ve told me. I’m going to take their experiences over what you’ve read. </p>
<p>I know very little about Stanford because I didn’t want to go to the west coast, but I just googled where Stanford was located and it said, like, it was 20 miles away from San Fransisco or something. That’s my bad if it’s not true or too much of a stretch.</p>
<p>herenow- a lot of parts of nyc were exaggerated as being ‘ghetto-like’ because there was a real perception of filth, grime and crime about a lot of neighborhoods that are considered good today. chelsea, hell’s kitchen, etc.</p>
<p>i think whereas calling moheights a ghetto is an insult to areas that are truly underresourced, it was by today’s standards not as safe.</p>
<p>i was really hoping someone would bring up EPA and the fact that stanford, like columbia, has its own nasty town-gown relationships, including getting part of the land it owned to become part of palo alto and not EPA because of concerns. </p>
<p>it wasn’t so long ago that epa was considered one of the most dangerous cities in the country. the movie dangerous minds was about epa. now it has changed a lot. but at a certain point we should realize that it is hard to be completely removed from crime. most large communities (which universities create and require to sustain itself) require people from different classes living in close proximity, and whenever you have that you’ll have some kind of crime (whether because rich kids create a market for drugs, or inequality of opportunity creates conditions for poverty and therefore crime). as epa has changed a lot over the years, so has harlem, morningside heights and most of new york. crime isn’t static, and few universities are removed from it - unless you’re dartmouth, where you’re removed from everything.</p>
<p>are you using harlem as a pejorative iceui? </p>
<p>there are many harlems. and proximity is a different idea in silicon valley as it is in new york city, often constructed around ease of travel. it is hard to get from east or even central harlem to morningside heights, whereas it is relatively easy to get from EPA to Stanford because preferred modes of travel are different.</p>
<p>and no contiguous spaces have ‘zero’ interaction with each other. such an idea is just false. but certainly support economies vary from place to place. new york is unique in that because of modes of travel most people that work at columbia’s campus come from the near south (just below 110), washington heights and inwood because of the way the subways run as opposed to coming from directly adjacent neighborhoods. my guess is that because of stanford’s location, support economies would have to come from the less affluent parts near it (epa primarily) and san jose and not from san francisco proper (in part because of modes of travel, and the necessity of having support economies nearby). who cleans the bathrooms, washes the dishes, etc. i would gather then that epa has a lot more direct impact on stanford life than harlem beyond morningside park because proximity is not the sole determinant of interaction, in many cases economic linkages are far greater determinants of interaction in most cases. </p>
<p>bringing up an argument based on proximity then is just well intellectually lazy, unless you are telling me that support economies for the stanford campus come from the well-to-do areas, or that somehow the fact that most folks who work at columbia live off of the 1 line makes them all harlemites.</p>
<p>The most recent of my half dozen or so visits to the Stanford campus was logistically challenged by a janitors’ strike/street protest. The interruptions would not have been as pronounced if Condi Rice’s Secret Service detail had been better briefed or more mellow. I have no idea where the vocal, placard-bearing, Spanish-speaking janitorial employees live, whether Palo Alto (unlikely) or East Palo Alto or elsewhere (much more likely), but I appreciated the extremely rare disruption of the country club life of Stanford (and I belong to a country club that needs more disruption).</p>
<p>Pretend the lifestyles of East Palo Alto are irrelevant to Stanford students, if you like. If you like that state of affairs, I suggest you expand your social science course selections. If you are uncomfortable with it, embrace your neighbors.</p>
<p>The Columbia community (sometimes ham-fistedly) seems to embrace the Harlem community, even though it’s really no closer to Columbia than East Palo Alto is to Stanford.</p>
<p>I may have allowed some of my political leaning enter this post. If so, I’m sorry.</p>
<p>^ well, maybe some Hypsm applicants decided to apply to Columbia since it was common app when it wasn’t one of their top schools. This is all speculation of course</p>
<p>An increase in the number of applicants, on its own, should not imply a drop in yield. The fact that Columbia switched to the CommonApp, though, suggests the yield will be lower for the very scenario you envision. That said, the yield rate probably won’t drop drastically.</p>
<p>figureskater is absolutely correct. I’m always amazed that people think Barnard is an undesirable or unprestigious school. Their graduation speaker was the COO of Facebook (much more famous than our graduation speaker, though Ms. Wallace-Creed was nice) and their president was just named to the Board of Directors at ****ing Goldman Sachs. Half their buildings are named after the family that controls the New York Times. It may not be a world-class research university that dominates the hard sciences, but Barnard has serious cachet in the city.</p>