<p>Which university is better? Please give me an honest opinion and reasons to back your claims.</p>
<p>I always wanted to know which college was better since both are similarly prestigious. Please tell me!</p>
<p>Which university is better? Please give me an honest opinion and reasons to back your claims.</p>
<p>I always wanted to know which college was better since both are similarly prestigious. Please tell me!</p>
<p>being the Columbia board, you are gonna see COLUMBIA as the winner. It's all relative. Both are great. If you like the city, COLUMBIA winss and if you like the bumble f of the bumble f, Cornell wins!!</p>
<p>Yeah depends what you like. Columbia is more prestigious, but they're both very prestigious, so don't even worry about that at all.</p>
<p>I like Columbia because I'm obsessed with music, and New York has the best music options I could find anywhere for the kinds of music I'm interested in, and I love the city and spend a lot of my time in the city even though I don't live there. I'm also a big fan of the Columbia campus and of the core, and also of the way the core can use the city's resources, such as for Art Hum and Music Hum (though I will replace the latter with a more specific class since I already know music).</p>
<p>cornell is a lot of work, a lot of hardcore rigorous work that teaches you a lot and gets you far. columbia is also a lot of work, but there's more of a sense of culture and background involved (the core) and can get you just as far and (if not farther) because of its location in New York City. and as for the social scene, columbia has the ultimate nightlife to balance out any sort of rigorous academic life. just my sense.
C
<a href="http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=soho%5B/url%5D">http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=soho</a>
the finalists - the best pictures from best nights of Columbia U- 2005.
<a href="http://www.CUfestival.com/%5B/url%5D">http://www.CUfestival.com/</a>
Columbia University National Undergraduate Film Festival.</p>
<p>both schools are pretty much equally prestigious. a lot depends on what you study. no one ever compares these two schools because the environments are completely different. if you love one school, you will hate the other.</p>
<p>Not true. Many students could be happy anywhere.</p>
<p>Depends on what you want to study---I would say that Columbia has it over Cornell in the humanites and Cornell has it over Columbia in the sciences. (Again there are some exceptions but not that many.)</p>
<p>cornell 2009 right here, but Columbia ROCKS!!! and anyone should be thrilled to attend.</p>
<p>Both are great, but very different schools. </p>
<p>Since I applied to both schools, I know a lot about both. Ultimately Cornell was best for me because I'm interested in biology or biological engineering. </p>
<p>Here's a quick synopsis of each, I'm not going to tell you which one is better because the schools are very different:</p>
<p>-Columbia has a metropolis atmosphere. Great for off-campus fun. Cornell is in a small city, and the city of ithaca caders to college students. Cornell has a very lively on-campus life, and anything you could ever want is on campus. Columbia you get the excitment of the city, but this comes at the expense of a less active campus life.</p>
<p>-Cornell has many more undergraduate, however the total student population of Columbia and Cornell including graduates are about the same. Interpret this data as you would like. It could either mean that students at Columbia have a more individual focus, or that the focus is on the graduate level. </p>
<p>-If you are interested in Engineering, if you are accepted to Columbia engineering, it is nearly impossible to gain admission to the college if you want to change your major. At cornell, it is flexible and fairly easy to change schools within the university.</p>
<p>-Columbia has a more "elite" feel. However, I hated this attitude. The tours and presentations for prospective undergrad basically screamed "If you're lucky enough for us to graciously accept you, here's where you'll spend your next four years" Cornell is more down to earth.</p>
<p>-I tend to agree that Columbia has an advantage in Humanities, while cornell is strong in sciences.</p>
<p>A little background about me (please understand that I am trying to control my Cornell bias): I was accepted at Cornell, and waitlisted at Columbia school of engineering. Coming from a small town, Cornell's environment was much more comfortable, and I find that it is a better place for me to pursue an undergrad. degree. Perhaps I can look at Columbia again for grad school though. Although Cornell is best for me, you probably have a very different background.</p>
<p>Well, if you have questions. . ..just pm me and I will try to answer as best I can.</p>
<p>Tkmonkey14, as many people have already said, it comes down to what you are interested in majoring in and how comfortable you are with the Core Curriculum at Columbia. If you want to do engineering or something engineering related, then I would say definitely apply to Cornell.</p>
<p>However, if you are not interested in engineering, then Columbia is definitely the better university. Its humanities and social sciences, economics and poltical science in particular, are simply outstanding.</p>
<p>I forgot to mention THE CORE at Columbia!!!</p>
<p>To me this was a downside to Columbia, but for some people it is an upside. Columbia requires everyone, including the engineers to take a set sequence of courses. . . .i forget what they are exactly but go to columbia.edu and search "the core" and it will tell you.</p>
<p>Since one of the big things I'm interested is engineering, the core courses basically took all the room left in the curriculum leaving little choice in choosing any courses.</p>
<p>At Cornell, they have distribution requirments, but other than the writting seminar there is no class that you absolutely have to take.</p>
<p>Although Columbia does have some of the best courses in social sciences and humanities, be careful before you discredit Cornell's social sciences and humanities.</p>
<p>Although Cornell is famous for its engineering and science courses, they are pretty strong accross the board. Not only does Cornell have many strong departments in such feilds (ex: Psychology, English), you may also bennefit of people's belief that Cornell is "just for sciences" and end up with small class sizes with renound professors. (However Psych. is not one of these, Psych. 101 is the largest class at Cornell. . . .it's at about 1,500 because the professor will not cap the class and everyone wants to take it!! Not necessarily a bad thing, I'd rather take a class with an amazing professor than not be able to get into the class has reached its limit)</p>
<p>So basically, in response to the last response. Yes, as a general rule Columbia's Social Science and Humanities are amazing. No, the program is not always better than Cornell, definately investigate the specific program you are interested in.</p>
<p>"both schools are pretty much equally prestigious."</p>
<p>Eh...</p>
<p>Columbia is def more prestigious than Cornell-by a longshot...</p>
<p>HOWEVER, if you want to study science/engineering, go to Cornell.</p>
<p>ehh columbia is significantly more prestigious than cornell....</p>
<p>I'm sorry to intrude, but how much more prestigious is COlumbia than Duke? I am going to Duke, but I love COlumbia like a first born son. lol</p>
<p>i think in the real world, columbia is more prestigious than duke but on these boards most people consider them to be equal or columbia to be only slightly better. This is because many CC kids only use the USNEWS rankings to assess schools.</p>
<p>Btw, both schools are amazing and whichever you choose would be great.</p>
<p>I chose Columbia over Duke, Georgetown SFS, UPenn, and Brown.</p>
<p>that's great ppl, this is a message board, when you ppl say i turned this for a, b, c, d, e, f, how does anyone know you are not lying. It is reallly easy to say yeah to yourself since i didn't get into Columiba, Duke, or Upenn but got into Dartmouth, I turned down Duke, Upenn, and Columbia. There are a sh$t load of liers on this board, in fact, it so pervasive a lot of the honest ppl are not even aware b/c it has become apart of the fabric of this board. I am going to Cornell, but I won't lie to you, UPenn, my dream school didn't take me, and I can easily say I turned them down, but I won't (I have enough self-respect to lie to a bunch of strangers). I am proud to say that the schools that I turned down are great schools and one shoud be as fortunate as I am to attend such wonderful schools. That's my 2 cents.</p>
<p>Also, the fact that you turn down X, Y, Z for your school doesn't make the schools you turned down any less worthy. Choosing a college comes down to personal preference. Honestly, someone mentioned they turned down Cornell Engineering for Columbia, that is there choice, I personally wouldn't have made that choice. You can call me biased, but at the end of the day, the engineering companies recruit at the top engineering schools and care most about the reputation of the program. You would be surprised how well respected Univ of Michigan engineering is and what kind of companies recruit there. Having an uncle working in one of the largest securities and financial companies in the world, I have personal knowledge about what corprate recruiters think. I might be a high school kid, but I know a company looking for engineers would much rather see someone from Cal Berk Engineering than a UPenn or Columbia engineer.</p>
<p>collegekid, I agree with just about everything you said. I have too noticed that lately lying and mindless arguing have become too prevalent on these boards...fyi, I wasnt lying though I guess I cant prove that.</p>
<p>Cornell has a lot of programs that Columbia doesn't have like the schools of Agriculture, Human Ecology, etc. I know Cornell has a prestigious Architecture program but I'm not sure if Columbia does. I know they have an Arch school for graduate work but I'm not sure if there is an undergraduate program associated with it.</p>
<p>The Core, from the structure and what I hear, is good because the intro and lower-level classes are small. That's the main difference that I can think of because the same classes are essentially taught at each school. If one wanted to culture him or herself, you can do that at Cornell too. At higher levels, the humanities are pretty much the same at both schools. The classes are small, taught by world-class professors, and filled with smart students. The sciences are the same at both school. Both are world-class. Besides the additional programs at Cornell, the other main academic difference is with engineering. From my understanding, Columbia engineers tend to go into non-engineering jobs like finance whereas Cornell engineers do both. That's not to say that coming from Columbia you can't find an industry job with some place like Intel. </p>
<p>The only people that think Columbia is <em>significantly</em> more prestigious are USNWR zealots. Go back a few years and the two schools are closer in ranking. There's a big prestige difference between a place like Cornell and Harvard, but it's nominal between Cornell and Columbia.</p>
<p>I have to once again repeat the very very stark differences in environment. It's completely different. Even the students seem to have different attitudes.</p>
<p>Just to lay my biases out on the table, I graduated as a Cornell engineer and will be going to grad school next year at Columbia in the sciences.</p>