<p>That is a load of bull. My daughter loved her years at Barnard and was on financial aid and working throughout. There is plenty to do in the city that isn’t particularly expensive, and plenty of opportunities for Barnard students to earn extra spending money.</p>
<p>@ocflav -
If Amherst is a better fit for you, then by all means go there – but I think that you should be particularly wary of someone who uses scare tactics to try to urge you toward one great college by demeaning another, equally strong college.</p>
<p>The Barnard/Columbia relationship gives students the best of both the LAC and research university without having to endure the drawbacks of either. You’ll have virtually an unlimited smorgasbord of courses to choose from, and the freedom to make choices that fit your learning style. If you don’t want large lecture courses and TA’s -then don’t enroll in any. You will have class size information for every class you choose at the time of enrollment. </p>
<p>If you prefer an open curriculum – that’s fine – but it depends on what you want out of an education. I’m not sure if it’s really that wonderful if a college can have STEM majors who never take a writing or a history course, or humanities major who manage to get away without any sort of math or science exposure during college. As a prospective student, that is for you to decide – but right now I think my daughter is very glad that she needed to take a basic stats course to fill a quantitative reasoning requirement. (No love of statistics, but it’s saving her time and money, as her transcript showing satisfactory completion of the undergrad course allowed her to waive out of a mandatory course at the grad school level). It’s one of those things that my d. griped about at the time, and has said that she is grateful for down the line. </p>
<p>@calmom I happened to notice the scare tactics in that earlier post as well lol…but the curricula of the two schools was something else I was considering. UChicago was my first choice (waitlisted), and I really liked its Core curriculum bc it unified students majoring in all different fields. They all read the same works. Has your D found 9 ways of knowing to be unifying? Even though I grumble about math and science, I do appreciate having knowledge in a number of subjects. Amherst’s open curriculum, on the other hand, is really flexible, and I was considering double majoring or majoring and double minoring (something of the sort). And tbh I like the idea of students learning about all different subjects like at Barnard, but at Amherst you know ppl are only in classes they really wanna be in. Hmm…the pros and cons list grows longer</p>
<p>@ocflav – my daughter was a poli sci major – I remember that her intro political theory class was limited to about 45 students. That was a problem because she couldn’t get in during pre-registration --but she emailed the prof and he let her in, so no problem. (And maybe there were then 46? – but that’s part of the problem with small classes – it can make it tough for students to get a spot with a popular class or professor. )</p>
<p>I think my d. typically had 8-10 students in the language sections , with a course limit of about 15 – I think that’s pretty standard for foreign language instruction. But you might look at the specific languages you want to study. You can browse through courses here: <a href=“CU Directory of Classes”>http://www.columbia.edu/cu/bulletin/uwb/</a> – the courses for fall 2014 are already listed, so you can just look through anything you are interested in and kind of imagine what you might choose to take. Courses that have the letters BC in front of them are offered via Barnard College – courses that have the letters W and V might be given at either college. Almost all courses are open to all students - the exception for you coming into Barnard would be the Columbia core – but of course there are many courses at Barnard offering similar content. As you browse through you will see that you can tell how many students are currently signed up for each class, and whether there is a limit on class size. </p>
<p>There are no restrictions as to the level of class you can enroll in, assuming that you meet the prereqs. So you definitely would not be restricted to intro-level classes your first year, especially with your interests. (Foundational requirements tend to be more of a barrier in math and sciences). </p>
<p>Again - registration is the same whether the course is Barnard or Columbia. </p>
<p>As a First Year, you wouldn’t use the listing I sent you for pre-enrollment – you’d get a separate and somewhat more restricted list of courses for the first semester, but there’s a shopping period in the fall and if something wasn’t available to you via the pre-enrollment process, you would still be able to switch to whatever you wanted in the fall. Not that it’s a bad idea to accept the accumulated wisdom of the Barnard Deans in figuring out which courses are appropriate for first year students… I think my daughter might have reached a little too high her first semester, and had something of a shock with her first midterm. She recovered quite nicely and in hindsight agreed with me when that it was a lesson well learned. </p>
<p>Thank you so much for your consistently awesome replies, @calmom ! The decision’s been keeping me up at night as soon as I got off the waitlist. It’s really tough. Plus, I have a lot friends and family in NY (having lived there for a bit & also with friends going to NYU). City life is so attractive, as well. There are just so many opportunities. Thank you again! I’ll try to get in touch with some students from Amherst to get some more input, but I’m really leaning towards Barnard</p>
I think that’s more of a problem on the math/science end of things. I started out as a STEM major at a large state U., and I did feel totally lost in my first year Chem class. It was a huge lecture hall with at least 400 students- maybe a lot more, I don’t remember. The prof spoke in a monotonous mumble, and 80% of the time I had no clue what he was talking about. Having a TA didn’t help, because my TA didn’t speak English. Somehow I managed to pull a B, but I decided early on the next semester to shift my focus, and to round out my schedule I enrolled in an upper division literature class, studying Shakespeare. I remember we read King Lear (among other plays). That happened to be a relatively small class - maybe 35 students --but if the course had been given in a lecture hall with 200 students- I am sure that it would have been just as easy for me to learn the content – because it was reading Shakespeare, something I could do quite nicely on my own if I wanted to. </p>
<p>I actually liked having a mix of large and small classes as an undergrad, because the larger, lecture classes could be very interesting but less demanding. You have to prepare more and be ready to participate in a small class – which is very nice, but can be stressful when you have 4 or 5 classes to worry about. A lecture course with an engaging prof (i.e., one who doesn’t put you to sleep) can be a place where you can sit back, listen, take notes, and catch up on the reading later on. I think at most schools word gets around about the best profs, and often their classes end up being moved into large lecture halls to accommodate the professor’s growing popularity. </p>
<p>If you browse some courses, you can hop over to Culpa and get a sense of what the profs are like. You will find some gems and you will find some duds, and you will find a wide range of opinions, some quite contradictory. But it will give you a good flavor of what you might experience in different courses.</p>
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<p>I do want to emphasize that I still think finances are very important. If your award from both schools are roughly equivalent, then you are very fortunate and have two wonderful choices to consider. But if there is a substantial differential between costs for one or another – then follow the money. There’s not enough difference in quality of education to justify paying a whole lot more for one than the other.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t say “unifying” – it’s a very broad and flexible set of distribution requirements. I would note that my daughter read many of the works that are in Columbia’s Lit/Hum core in classes she took, such as political theory and a religion course. </p>
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<p>My d took astronomy has lab science as a sophomore – and she told me that year that of all her courses it was the most interesting to her and the one where she was learning the most. Probably precisely because it was a subject she hadn’t explored very much before taking the course. </p>
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You can certainly do that at Barnard. Because the 9-ways of knowing is so flexible, it really isn’t going to be taking away time that can be spent on courses in a major or minor. Some of the courses will fit your major anyway – for example, if you want to minor in a foreign language then you would be filling the requirements for your minor at the same time as you were filling the language requirement. </p>
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<p>I don’t have any direct info about Amherst, but my son attended a smaller suburban LAC that promised small class sizes for everyone – and he often found himself shut out of the classes he wanted because of class size restrictions… The class registration system was set up to that he was guaranteed of getting at least one of his top choice classes – but every semester there would be at least one class that he really didn’t want at all, but was the best he could manage to find that fit his schedule and still had openings. Needless to say, the classes with openings tended also to be the ones with the least popular professors. </p>
<p>My d. never had that issue at Barnard. There were always plenty of classes to choose from, and she ended up getting every course she wanted- even though there are some seminars with restricted enrollment. There were classes that turned out to be not so great in hindsight-- classes that she thought she wanted to be in but in hindsight wished she could get out of… I think that could happen anywhere. So just because students have complete freedom to choose doesn’t mean they always get what they want. You would need to talk to current or recent students about how things generally go in that respect. </p>
<p>@ocflav, my DS14 is in EXACTLY the same predicament as you, he to has been admitted off the waitlist today, accepted @ Wes and pursued by Wes relentlessly for 6 months and now has the admittance to Amherst, I was pulling my hair out as he got the call. btw I did mean best friend female as :bf, thx</p>
<p>I don’t know what to say both your choices are amazing and I think his are to, Amherst Vs Barnard & Amherst Vs Wesleyan…what do you say…?</p>
<p>@calmom - I have to know, what book/movie??</p>
<p>OP, have you visited the campuses? I would absolutely not commit to a college if you haven’t visited. If you haven’t been to either campus then I guess you have to decide in the dark, but since you say you love NYC I would choose based on that. For people who really love living in a big city, there really is no substitute.</p>
<p>Dusty, I don’t remember which book/movie-- it was a long time ago, it could have been just about anything. I don’t even know if that really was the reason for the lower grade or if it was just a comment that my daughter seized on to use to convince the prof to review the paper. Plus my daughter is the type who would debate over an A- vs. an A— the main point of the story is that Barnard profs are accessible to students, whether or not they have TA’s to help them with grading essays and exams. </p>
<p>And TA’s are fallible anywhere. My d is in grad school and emailed me a few days ago over a grammar issue because of a change a TA made in a paper she was working on. My daughter is getting a master’s – I’m thinking that the TA is probably a PhD student. It was an issue related to use of a collective noun coupled with a singular verb. I told my daughter that (a) she was right and the TA was wrong, and (b) best solution would be to reword the sentence to avoid the problem. See <a href=“http://www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/singular_plural_%20collective_noun.htm”>http://www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/singular_plural_%20collective_noun.htm</a> for more about that particular grammatical nuance. </p>
<p>I would go to amherst. The small LAC experience at a school like Amherst is probably the best education one can really get (this is from someone who is not going to a LAC next year). At Barnard, you might feel secondary compared to Columbia (kind of like second class). I know that many people will disagree with me but I wouldn’t want to feel like being “second class” because I couldn’t get into the “first class” school. Its sad but true. Best of luck.</p>
<p>I don’t agree that Amherst has higher name recognition. Barnard is very well-known.</p>
<p>You’d get a great education at either place although there’s no doubt that internships would be much easier if you were at Barnard. I know someone who graduated from Barnard two years ago who went into publishing. NYC is, of course, a center for publishing, and she was helped by having had an internship while at Barnard.</p>
<p>@dustypig yes, I’ve visited both campuses! I love Barnard’s setting obviously, but I also really liked amherst when I visited. It’s in a college town with a fair amt of restaurants and coffee shops. And then there’s the 5 college system and the bus to Northampton which I absolutely adore! Great hippy vibe and plenty of shops (: which almost makes me wish that I’d liked Smith when I visited bc it’s right in Northampton, but that’s a different story lol</p>
<p>@spuding102 I had thought of the “second-class” thing before as well. I know it’s not the way to feel about it, but it definitely was something I was considering Barnard before the May 1 deadline</p>
<p>@Englishman good luck to your son! It’s an incredibly hard choice. It’s hard to say goodbye to Barnard bc I’ve built it up so much in my mind. But I probably would’ve chosen amherst over Barnard originally <em>sigh</em> now I feel like I’m searching for reasons not to go to Amherst, but I really do like it, sooo I think I’ll get in touch with current students. I want to sift through any generalizations about Amherst I’ve heard</p>
<p>I don’t get it. Why bother with Barnard?- a five acre campus versus a thousand acre one, a poor endowment ($100K per student) versus one of over a million dollars per student, TA’s versus professors only, and then there’s the whole status thing. Further, Barnard is women only. The reality is that the majority of them can’t compete with the men or women at Columbia or Amherst.</p>
<p>I have no dog in this fight and think either would be a great choice for a student making the choice for the right reasons. However, some allude that Barnard has better internship possibilities because of it’s NYC location, and that probably isn’t true. Each of the NESCACs (Amherst is one) is very plugged into the the Boston-Washington corridors of power in their own way and can open doors despite their apparent remote locations. My wife’s partner has a daughter who just graduated from Hamilton, not exactly at the center of anything but cows, who got her first job in NYC at a media company that no one gets into without some connection - and Hamilton got her that connection. Amherst can do he same thing, as does Barnard - the alumni connections at all these schools are amazing, the formal programs each has set up for shadowing and internships over breaks or the summer is equally impressive, you just have to ask and apply.</p>
<p>My daughter attended Amherst (Class of 2011) and I used to teach at Barnard - as each poster stated both are outstanding institutions - unless being in New York is your primary goal - Amherst is such an extraordinary institution with amazing professors, enormously diverse students, untold opportunities and the most loyal and helpful alums, it would be hard to turn it down. It is in a beautiful setting and does have the 5 college consortium. Because I lived in New York, I can understand the excitement of being in the City. Living in Amherst will be a totally different experience - the quintessential New England College town. When I taught at Barnard, there was a constant rivalry between the women at Columbia versus the women at Barnard . For unfounded reasons, many of the women students at Columbia had an air of superiority over the women at Barnard. In reality, there was no difference that I noticed in their intellectual capabilities. </p>
<p>OP, I said ‘no’ at Amherst. Why? Simply because the culture there was not what I wanted.</p>
<p>It’s not a big deal. You aren’t saying ‘no’ to Harvard or something. I don’t understand why people consider Amherst to be SO amazing that any other liberal arts school isn’t worth considering.</p>
<p>Amherst is NOT a better school than Barnard, NOT for everybody. It is a better school to US News and everyone who follows it blindly. It is a better school to those who think that selectivity should dictate your decision to attend a school – you are there at the expense of thousand others who were not admitted. Does that matter? Not to everybody.</p>
<p>That said, there are several things that are wonderful about Amherst (not the dorms, though ).</p>
<p>Fit is very, very important.</p>
<p>I know you have pretty much chosen Amherst (saw your post on Reed’s subforum). Have a great four years!</p>
<p>My S had a similar quandry and I felt he was overthinking things. And all, he had built up his second choice school in his mind since he was prepared (and would have been happy) to go there. So, I told him to answer this questions immediately after I asked it…“If you got into both schools from the start where would you have gone?” And his immediate answer was the school he got into off the waitlist. Then I asked him if anything important changed about the two schools other than when he was accepted and he said no. Then he smiled and knew his answer…and there is no doubt at all that he made the right choice by accepting the spot on the waitlist to his first choice school. </p>
<p>So my bottom line was if Amherst was your top choice and you got in, why not go? Barnard is a great school in a great city, but Amherst is one of the top LACs in the country. I wouldn’t let being accepted a few weeks later hold you back from attending the school you always preferred. </p>
<p>But @MrMom, there is a big difference on internships to actually be in the place where it is during the semester and having one in the summer in a city away from campus. During the semester, one can fit it in if you live in a place with opportunities and you don’t have to move somewhere and get a place to live, as you would in the summer. For students without a lot of money, that’s a big plus.</p>
– but that’s part of the problem with small classes – it can make it tough for students to get a spot with a popular class or professor. )</p>
).</p>