Hi I got flagged here by #33.
My D2 did transfer from Barnard, found it was not her cup of tea, as it were.
But there are people who transfer from virtually every college. IIRC Barnard has a high retention and graduation rate. The kids of the other CC parents who posted at the time all said their kids loved it. One of them married a Columbia grad.
OP says she wants a school in the city, and less of a campus, that’s just what is on offer. For better or for worse. My D2 might say “Be careful for what you wish for”. But it is exactly what many others want. Evidently.
I imagine that at most selective universities that have colleges with separate and different admissions protocols, if one college there is significantly more selective than the others, some subset of its students will deem themselves “better” than the less selective ones. It’s probably human nature, to an extent. But it may be more culturally permissible to express these sentiments at some universities than at others. Sadly my D2 did experience some of this attitude( though that alone was not why she left). But most of the other CC parents said their kids did not.
As mentioned by others above, Barnard is an “affiliate” of Columbia. Exactly what this means in terms of degree of “belonging” can be quite ambiguous, for those inclined to look for distinctions. Barnard itself emphasizes their integration, but not everyone at Columbia shares this view.
One can indeed find legions of past discussions on all these issues by searching on the CC Columbia and Barnard subforums on the name of the other school.
To the extent all of this was a concern then, it might well be less so now. IIRC Barnard has become yet more selective. The Columbia administration has taken steps to make Barnard appear to be more “part of the team”, eg by including it in certain places on its website where formerly it did not. Also the Athena Center is now completed, so hopefully the Barnard women have at least someplace to go now, besides their dorm rooms or traipsing into the city.
My D2 took English courses at Barnard, I think, and thought they were very good.
One has to evaluate the whole package at every situation, and they all have relative good points and less good points.
Other points:
-Northwestern has separate colleges too, at least some (The seminaries) are also “affiliates”. But the stats for its different colleges are not that different, or that available, and this relative snobbery is not much of a “thing” there. As others have pointed out, it is in a suburb. When you go out routinely, you will likely almost always be going out in Evanston.
- JHU's English department is good, from what I could tell when I looked.
-None of these three schools are “easy”.