Wellllllllll, I’d posit that this gets to the heart of the intrinsic specialness of Barnard as it relates to CU (and CC et al) but I am happy to let those with more knowledge and experience opine.
I don’t think that’s correct. There appear to be/have been two class action lawsuits by students arising out of the “fudged data” fiasco:
I don’t know the status, but there are clear consumer protection issues here. Remember that, for many applicants, they had to pay an application fee to apply to Columbia. And, of course, matriculating students made a decision to attend and pay fees (if applicable), arguably as a result of reliance on the alleged deception.
I am very surprised that Columbia’s Board of Trustees didn’t commission an independent investigation (e.g., by a reputable law firm) to find what happened and why. That, to me, would be a demonstration that the University was, in good faith, trying to get to the bottom of why all this happened. Perhaps it’s because there is pending litigation?
Again, I haven’t checked the status of the class-action lawsuits, but I am not at all surprised that Columbia was sued for this.
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Incoming lawsuit wherein the law firm makes $1.6B and each applicant gets $6.
Perhaps, but the issue is whether Columbia has legal liability for the fudged data. That’s what these and perhaps other lawsuits might answer.
I call BS on these lawsuits. I don’t know how much legal merit they’ll have. Essentially these students are saying they went to Columbia based on its #2 ranking on a magazine’s list - and not for the education and experience they expected to receive. The fees and tuition they paid were for their education and they’re not claiming they were duped in that regard.
This is akin to enjoying a meal at a 3 star Michelin restaurant and then later someone alleging they bribed the Michelin judge. So in fact they’re only worthy of 2 stars instead of 3.
You could sue the restaurant if you paid and weren’t served, or there were significant issues with your food - but not because it turns out in retrospect that it isn’t as highly rated as you thought it was.
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Time will tell. Consumer protection laws are premised on non-deception, so this was easy to foresee.
Also, bonds were sold to finance projects at Columbia. Take a look at this description and tell me that an investor who bought these bonds might not raise issues with the disclosures made in selling the bonds:
Having done a lot of SEC and state blue-sky securities work in my career, I would be worried if a client had provided wrong information that may have been used in the required disclosures to sell securities etc. This press release, which very arguably itself is a disclosure, clearly talks about Columbia’s elite status etc as reason as to why the bonds are a good investment.
I wouldn’t want to be in Columbia’s shoes when there is admitted wrong information.
ETA: These are being sold after the discrepenancy was cleared up, so perhaps this isn’t the best example.
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I agree their behavior is shameful and ethically troublesome. But I’m not convinced there’s legal liability, that’s all.
Are they less elite at #18 vs #2? Do investors have reasonable basis to expect Columbia’s credit worthiness is/will be impacted? Will there be a material drop in revenue? Is S&P or Moody’s downgrading Columbia?
If not, I don’t see what harm can be claimed by the plaintiffs. Anyway, just my view.
Sure. I’m not either, but I guess my point is that there are allegations of legal wrong-doing that have made it to court. By no means does that mean that Columbia has actually committed wrong-doings. Indeed, any settlement, if that were to occur, would likely be without an admission of wrongdoing.
One of the great problems with litigation like this, assuming the complaint(s) survive motions to dismiss or for summary judgement, is that it opens the school up to discovery by the plaintiffs. If the information was provided to USNWR because of mistakes, that might help. But if discovery (documents, witness testimony, written questions) shows it was intentional, that’s totally different.
Time will tell. If anyone has updates on these class-action suits, that would be great.
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The different CDS doesn’t say much about the “experience” and more about the admission process. A CC/SEAS applicant is facing the lowest ivy league admission stats after Harvard. A GS applicant is 7x more likely to be admitted from their pool than a CC/SEAS applicant. They have a lower average test score, lower average GPA, etc. But once in, they are sitting in the same classes with the same professors, getting graded on the same tests and assignments on the same curve. They can participate in any group, have access to all the same resources, etc. True, there are aid and housing differences and they don’t have as many core requirements. But the experience seems to overlap far more than it doesn’t.
CS and SEAS are admitted as one pool, they are all fresh out of HS and most are focused on CU’s curriculum as full-time student. GS students aren’t just out of HS and often are in joint programs with other institutions, etc.
Bingo.
Columbia’s argument is that lumping GS stats with everyone else penalizes them versus their peers for maintaining a program for non-traditional students – it discourages a worthy institutional priority. That’s probably true. GS is a great program and opportunity for smart non-traditional students.
That said, many of the ways Columbia cheated their data had nothing to do with GS. For example, GS is not why they counted the entire cost of operating their hospital as a teaching expense. So in the end there are two different truths here that Columbia would prefer be conflated when they aren’t. First, that they manipulated their data with USN previously, for reasons that were not simply rooted in protecting their GS program. Second, now that they have shared the GS data they feel USN’s ranking methodology will significantly hurt them by aggregating it with their other programs and meaningfully impacting their stats. So better, they seem to have decided, to spin not playing as taking the high road in defense of protecting a program for non-traditional students. A ranking based on non-participation will leave some doubt about the true ranking whereas one based on cooperation will not.
The irony is if they had been more ethical/less ranking greedy in the first place and not manipulated their data but still not released a CDS, the issue probably never would have come up and they could have continued to self-interpret how to handle GS. Being exposed forced their hand on releasing CDS data and set up the current dilemma for them. So they set themselves up, essentially.
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But what about non-traditional students who want to apply to Columbia and major in something only offered in SEAS?
Who asserted that, given that “experience” can mean anything?
GS and CC/SEAS essentially have mutually exclusive entry requirements, and addressing two complete different applicant populations. It only makes sense to publish separate CDS’ - but that does not inform about same/differing experiences.
In the broadest sense, at any college in the nation, even the “experience” of a Dance Major will be wildly different from an Engineering student - yet the same CDS.
More specifically to Columbia U, it’s painfully obvious that the “undergraduate experience” of a General Studies student, possibly trying to schedule mostly late classes as to not interfere with their job or having to pick up kids from school, and wondering how to meet for group assignments, necessarily will be entirely different, than the traditional experience of a dorm-living kid, just out of high school, whose only full-time obligation is to themselves and being a CC/SEAS student.
But leaving out the living/personal situation of students, in the narrower sense the course/lecture/seminar portion of the experience will indeed be the same for all students in the same course.
You can connect any arbitrary two dots in the universe - that doesn’t suddenly create meaning.
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The “overall” qualifier preempts any meaningful answer: Clearly any young woman who doesn’t have to share their dorm with a bunch of barely not-anymore high school boys (sorry, Moms), or who can walk to the health center in their PJs, will have a different “overall experience” - if that’s your point!?
But in any way that actually matters to prospective students/parents, the fact that Columbia College is publishing a CDS does not change that the experience of all undergraduate students from the 4 university colleges sharing the same spaces and classes is indeed… the same.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t differences between the colleges, such as some having various versions of a narrow/prescriptive core curriculum, and the other having a broad/permissive distribution requirement, again leading to different “overall” experiences.
Even SEAS and CC students don’t have the same “overall” experience.
Looking to deep here!
The easy fact is that the University simply cannot speak for Barnard, from a corporate law perspective. So if you’re an undergraduate student at Columbia University, you are quite used to read most university-wide communication twice, once by the university leadership, and a similar announcement by the Barnard counterpart.
While the 4 colleges and their faculty are indeed “academically” and socially integrated (which is all that matters to students), their corporate relation is contractual.
(Kinda like all your kids being true “family”, while relationship between the parents is essentially contractual.)
Barnard has its own admissions process and department, and its own Federal School ID - naturally they publish their own CDS.
For Columbia to limit this particular announcement to CC/SEAS and GS is properly respecting corporate boundaries - as is always done in daily practice.
Or, rather than choosing language that implies some sort of strategic thinking - if we’re really “being honest”, one must not combine two distinctly different datasets, because it will come at a loss of information/resolution.
Sure, I can “combine” the statistics of a Hummingbird with that of a Condor - but the result is less informing than when looking at them separately.
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That is decidedly not the experience of the close family member I have who was a GS student (graduated a year ago), nor that of the handful of friends he made there. We took them out for a celebratory dinner and most of the conversation centered around their feelings of having been ‘othered’ throughout their time at Columbia, both via the administration and faculty. Less so by students.
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Why shouldn’t they be othered, have you seen the acceptance rate? 57% transfer acceptance rate, and 33% regular. If this was a non ivy people would call this a scam. They shouldn’t be exalted with typical Columbia prestige when its easier to get into than W&M or even UGA.
One cannot challenge how it felt to them - and we certainly don’t get first-hand perspectives from GS students here at CollegeConfidential often enough.
Yes, many students will not be aware which college other people in a course attends, unless it comes up in casual conversation during group studies etc.
I can imagine that GS students may have very distinct life situations and needs to manage/accommodate them, for which there’ll be a lack of understanding/appreciation by their peers - which to can quickly result in a real “othered” feel.
As far as administration, I can see that every college operates with different parameters from the others, which might control how administration has to approach specific situations, or unique needs that might not usually arise from the other 3 colleges.
As far as faculty, it would be great to hear more from GS students!
No matter how “same” it might appear to the other university students from whom we usually hear, they would not necessarily be aware of (possibly subtle) faculty issues unless fellow GS students made mention of it.
Thank you!
At least fellow students will have no awareness of GS acceptance stats - as they were not competing for the same admission spots in highschool. I can’t speak to how it feels to GS students, but from the years my daughter spent with them in courses, seminars and labs, the fact that some were GS students was never a topic. If anything, it came up in group assignments, when students from different majors/athletics/life situations tried to align their schedules, or because she noticed that the occasional late afternoon class had some students rushing to get there, and eventually realizing they had to commute from their day jobs.
Frankly, once you’re a college student, you couldn’t care about average stats or admission rates - because you actually see each student individually excel in some topics, or less so in others - across all four colleges.
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It seems laughable to me that any student anywhere should be “exalted.”
The last Columbia GS student I recall hiring was a decade older than the typical undergrad, because he had enlisted in the marines after HS. Deployed almost immediately to three different “hot spots” (including an active war zone) after finishing his training stateside.
I can only imagine what he contributed to class discussions on war, the socio/economic issues in a developing economy in the Arab world, the geopolitics of US interventionism, etc. Not to mention his fluency in TWO strategic languages plus the Spanish he learned in HS.
I’m OK “exalting” him along with the 18 year old gunners who’ve spent HS cramming for the SAT, angling for an extra credit point or two so as not to lose their “perfect” GPA, and bragging about honor society, President of several clubs, and their fantastic tennis serve. Really, I’m ok. He “belonged” at Columbia just fine.
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I think most everyone who pays attention to colleges is aware of Columbia’s immense quality.
Regardless of their USN&WR ranking, they’re perpetually in my top 10. They’ve earned that reputation with their research output and academic quality across disciplines.
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You have considered that the application pool going “back” to college in the U.S. is a tiny fraction of the number of high school grads for that year?
Acceptance rate is not just a function of selectivity, but also directly proportional to the dividend!
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