<p>So, you think that prestige is based on the opinions of the elite upper class, while I believe that prestige is based on the opinions of the entire public. Those are two understandable and debatable definitions. Therefore the debate is not whether Brown or Columbia is more prestigious, but rather, how prestige should be defined.</p>
<p>Based on my definition, MIT and Stanford are equally prestigious to Harvard. And Columbia is more prestigious than Brown. However, coming from your definition of prestige, I can see why Brown might be argued as more prestigious.</p>
<p>SoWhat?, more people’d choose Brown because some are turned on by the Open Curriculum (no math? woo!). And I believe that statistic asks high school students what they would choose IF they got accepted to both schools.</p>
<p>Wow, I have not heard anyone quote C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite since it was required reading at St. Paul’s (35+ years ago). As an aside, ** please recall the Mills was a Sociology Professor at Columbia**. Also recognize that the “st. grottlesex” schools have become a meritocracy. These days, they admit students who have incredible academic potential, those kids get high SAT’s (which they would have had at any school), and then SURPRISE, those academically talened teens get admitted to a number of great schools. No conspiracy there. </p>
<p>Oh and both great schools depending on what you are looking for.</p>
<p>There wasn’t any such success, especially when you take into account the heavy bonus the Revealed Preference method awards to schools with self-selected applicant pools (leading to a major over-rating of Caltech, BYU, Wellesley, Notre Dame). </p>
<p>Even with that bonus, the Revealed Preference study couldn’t figure out whether Brown, Columbia or some other school was the head of the second tier (that is, number 7 after HYPSMC which, in some order, were a clear top six). In most of the resampling simulations, Brown was below number 7; in a fifth of them, it ranked below Columbia.</p>
<p>Basically, Brown had a marginal edge over Columbia that disappears or is reversed when taking the self-selection bonus into account. Brown outranking Columbia is an outcome that the study assigned a low statistical confidence, 80 percent, and that confidence would drop under any analysis of the self-selection effect. </p>
<p>There is an online admissions database (mychances) that calculates Elo point rankings based on cross-admit battles of thousands of students, similar to the Revealed Preference method. The sample size is comparable to the original study (much larger overall, somewhat smaller for the top applicants) and they also provide direct cross-admit results for given pairs of schools. That site has Columbia beating Brown 63 to 37 percent in cross-admits; from reverse engineering the confidence interval it appears the number of tournaments was 25-35, which is similar to the Revealed Preference study (about 150 total matriculants at Brown and Columbia, so about 20 to 45 direct contests). Their Elo point rankings have Columbia at 8th and Brown 11th for 2009, with the reverse of that result (Columbia 11th, Brown 8th) as the result for all years. </p>
<p>In short, Brown and Columbia are indistinguishable as far as published calculations based on cross-admit data are concerned. Statements of the admissions offices would be more illuminating, if they are available at all.</p>
<p>I’ll be honest. I’m from Florida and never once had heard of Columbia until my junior year of high school. I’ve known about Brown since I was seven. I’m not sure one is any more prestigious than the other…but to say that everyone has heard of Columbia and few have heard of Brown is a wildly inaccurate statement.</p>
<p>Siserune - I just visited mychances.com and came away with some fascinating observations.</p>
<p>The cross-admit data provided bizarre, though not necessarily inaccurate, results. As you said, it showed Columbia leading Brown, 63% to 37%. It also showed Penn and Columbia about dead even (44% to 56%, Columbia ahead by 6%). So far, so good. But then, two things stood out:
It has Penn and Stanford deadlocked, at 50/50. This seems inaccurate, especially because
Stanford beats Columbia, 70/30.</p>
<p>Now, obviously college admissions aren’t as translucent as rocks-paper-scissor, and statistics can screw up data, but that seems like a stark departure.</p>
<p>Other oddities:
Penn beating MIT 60/40, Dartmouth pulling dead even with MIT at 50/50, etc.</p>
<p>I suppose what the data really highlight is that these schools are all within the same neighborhood of elites, and applicants are essentially as attracted to one as another. The only true standouts are Harvard, which beats all schools handily, and Cornell, which loses to all.</p>
<p>Does that help settle this ridiculous argument?</p>
<p>I guess what I’m trying to say is, Brown=Columbia in prestige in the eyes of most graduating high school seniors. To those who only consider US News, Columbia will be better - and to those who listen to their parents, it will undoubtedly be Brown (which was, between the late 60’s and late 90’s, one of the most prestigious and popular colleges out there). But the differences are really negligible, ancient sociologists notwithstanding.</p>
Is that a northeastern perspective? I’m curious, because my parents (born/raised in the southeast) had never heard of Brown until I considered it for college (I read about it in the Fiske Guide). They didn’t know much about Columbia either, although they had at least vaguely heard the name.</p>
<p>Interestingly, my first interaction with Brown was at a group information session with representatives from both Brown and Columbia, as well as Chicago, Cornell, and (I think) Rice. The memories that stuck were the Columbia table getting mobbed and the Cornell rep being the one to fix the projector (stereotypical, eh?).</p>
<p>I’d have to agree with the consensus opinion that Columbia has significantly more “lay” prestige, but at the undergrad level, the two institutions are quite comparable. </p>
<p>At the gradaute level, Columbia has a storied past and enviable present- most Nobels of any university in the world, the Manhattan Project, etc.</p>
<p>If one is interested in Wall Street, Columbia is a target school for every investment bank and boutique firm, while Brown isn’t- and the numbers NY banks hire from each school heavily favor Columbia. However, far more people at Columbia are interested in banking and trading than at Brown, so the competition is much worse.</p>
<p>For pre-law and pre-medicine tracks, it might be better to go to Brown because one can manage GPA a bit more easily. Also, Brown allows for a lot of advanced work at the undergrad level, which makes it a great choice for future PhD applicants. </p>
<p>Also the prep school argument may not be the best- I think Penn enrolls the largest number of students from the elite schools- would you say Penn is more prestigous than Brown simply because of this small sample of applicants?</p>
<p>The same sorts of anomalies are presumed to occur in the Revealed Preference data, because the sheer number of different head to head comparisons (45 between the top 10 schools, 4545 for the top 100) spreads the data very thin for direct observation of cross-admits. </p>
<p>There is also no reason to believe that the cross-admit rates for all pairs of schools stitch together into a linear ranking without rock/paper/scissors cycles of dominance (A > B > C > A), even at the top ranks where more data is available. The basic assumption of the Revealed Preferences method is that comparisons do linearize within the top tier, but that isn’t quite true as shown by their Caltech results and other anomalies. It seems that Caltech/MIT/Stanford are heterogeneous with<br>
Harvard/Yale/Princeton and can’t necessarily be combined into a uniquely ranked top six.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If you consider the “confidence probabilities” they provide for the rankings there is a clear top six with a giant separation from all the others, with vaguely separated pseudo-tiers below that, and substantial uncertainty within and below the top six as to where any given school stands. I think that and the lack of linearization (even in top six) were the only real ranking outputs of the study. More data won’t necessarily improve things.</p>
<p>These are both such good schools at the undergrad level that in most cases there will be almost no difference in the longrun for you career-wise. So go to the one you like more, in my case that would be Brown.</p>
<p>I chose Brown over Columbia because simply, I wanted the best college experience possible and I thought the community and campus environment of Brown was much more appealing. After consulting with a number of people who actually have graduated from these types schools (including my brothers who went to Dartmouth (now at HBS) and Harvard) the overall consensus was both will get you to the same place, but Brown will be more fun.</p>
<p>Quite honestly it seems like Columbia’s “perceived” quality is higher than it actually is. It doesn’t seem to do better than others non-HYP Ivies with recruiting (I think Dartmouth wins there), getting people into places like Yale and Harvard Law (Brown and Dartmouth do the best of the non-HYP); nor is it that rich per student or anything else HYPS level. So why does it get put on a pedestal?</p>
<p>Columbia is put on a pedestal over Brown, because it’s got everything a better school should have: larger graduate schools, which drags in the best professors (more Nobel laureates affiliated with it than Harvard), which should have brought in better students when the school was still small (both graduate and undergraduate), initially, becoming a positive cycle. Brown, however, doesn’t have as good graduate schools, strangely, even when it’s a university, and not a college. It is a fact that Brown accepts top students in the undergraduate program DESPITE its lack of large professional schools, few graduate programs, etc, not THANKS TO it. It’s just pure nonsense that Brown isn’t interested in increasing its graduate schools as some Brown students try to hint at by emphasizing the schools’ founding principles of the “core curriculum” and “liberal arts education”. Liberal arts education applies to all undergrad programs at this point. Brown itself admits that it is regretfully short of graduate school reputation, but it doesn’t have the money to make one, so it perhaps (and a tiny bit of school philosophy added) focused on the college instead. Now, as its rankings fall, it now more than ever, needs grad school prestige to keep up with the ivy league, because the graduate school is in fact the center of a university in the purely academic and traditional point of view, and as a university, Brown can use the positive effects that trickle down from graduate school to the image (and everything else) of the college.</p>
<p>Now you might bring up the quality of education and say Brown has an advantage over many large Ivies because of its focus on undergraduate education. But at the college level, generally studying and planning are up to the individual student, and as a Brunonian, I’ve never truly benefited from having back-tattering professors during freshman year, except in feeling that I was a little more closely cared for, and that I was still treated like a baby. Besides, what’s wrong with TAs teaching introductory/intermediate classes? In some cases, the so called “professors” that fill in classrooms at Brown are beginning professors or post-docs without tenures.</p>
<p>Also, look at the journals Columbia publishes, the awards they give out (the Pulitzer and many others), the types of world leaders, etc and so on that Columbia can drag into its conferences: not in half a decade will Brown be able to do such things.</p>
<p>Also, look at the journals Columbia publishes, the awards they give out (the Pulitzer and many others), the types of world leaders, etc and so on that Columbia can drag into its conferences: not in half a decade will Brown be able to do such things. Do these aspects influence undergraduate studies? At least it will influence undergrad morale; more schooly and more in the center of things, instead of being in the center of nowhere and being brown where nobody notices.</p>
<p>Hey did anyone notice how transfer…nah is a total ■■■■■? He/ she asked the original question “which one…columbia or Brown” only to chime in (after not hearing what they wanted) heavily in favor of Columbia, only to basically delete the original post to try and cover his/ her tracks.</p>
<p>Then he/she cites that he/she is a “brunonian” as to lend some credibility to the statements, as if no one would notice that in their original post they claimed to be looking between the two schools.</p>
<p>it’s important for the university’s future. without graduate emphasis, Brown will surely start lagging behind and will have to, in some time in the future, grapple for smart students. </p>