<p>^ … well I believe Columbia’s main gate is at 116th street and NYU is in the Village and I believe south of the beginning of the grid … so the schools are over 6 miles apart North-South … I do not know how long that would take on a subway but it would be a bit of a hike.</p>
<p>from leaving a dorm on main campus it takes 35-50 minutes to get to NYU including everything depending on which part of NYU you want to go to.</p>
<p>My oldest child will be a senior at NYU Tisch in the fall. There probably is no better school in the country to prepare for a career in acting. My youngest would like to pursue journalism and will be a freshman at Columbia. Columbia is the only Ivy with a graduate school of journalism. Undergrads are allowed to take courses in the journalism school.</p>
<p>Each school seems like the best fit for each child. I could not be happier for both of them.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s a question of which school is better. It all depends on the student and what they are looking for.</p>
<p>The one area where there is a big difference is in financial aid. Columbia has a much larger endowment and can offer more aid to students who demonstrate need. NYU’s endowment does not allow this so some families who would otherwise qualify for aid (based on their FAFSA EFC), don’t receive it.</p>
<p>In full disclosure, I am a Columbia Graduate School of Business alum.</p>
<p>NYU is community college compared to an Ivy like Columbia.</p>
<p>“NYU is community college compared to an Ivy like Columbia.”</p>
<p>In what lifetime? You need to get out more.</p>
<p>they still have a number of very highly regarded programs. for example, the Courant Institute is easily the foremost location for Applied Math research in the world, and the smartest applied math students all want to go there for their graduate work, or for employment. And then you have Tisch and Stern and so on.</p>
<p>There are a great many universities which do not provide enough value for their standard $50k/yr price tag of a private college - but NYU is not one of them. Do I think Columbia is a better place to go for undergrad? Sure. I’ll even call it a slam-dunk in 90% of cases. But let’s not act like this is University of Bridgeport we’re talking about.</p>
<p>at the graduate level:</p>
<p>NYU > Columbia in applied math, tied with Columbia in pure math</p>
<p>Columbia > NYU in most science departments</p>
<p>NYU = Columbia in business and economics</p>
<p>Columbia >> NYU in most humanities departments</p>
<p>NYU > Columbia in the arts, theater, etc. (except architecture)</p>
<p>Lol sorry i just wanted to see the reaction from the other posters.
I’m just an immature sophomore lol.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’d say Columbia has a better pure math dept.
In business you might be able to argue that Columbia and NYU are tied, but for economics Columbia definitely trumps NYU.</p>
<p>among the graduate business schools, Columbia is measurably superior to NYU-Stern.</p>
<p>And I say this as a likely Stern MBA in the fall.</p>
<p>you guys are wrong- NYU Econ had a much better recruiting season this year placing its graduates at top 15 departments- read econjobrumours</p>
<p>I think NYU Stern is a bit stronger in finance and about the same as Columbia GSB in everything else by strength of faculty (e.g. Engle at NYU). That said, both Columbia and NYU are top targets for sales & trading and probably Columbia has a slight advantage in corp fin. For PE, both are at a disadvantage to Stanford, Harvard and Wharton. Columbia also has a very prestigious value-investing program with Bruce Greenwald and is active in the Pershing Square investment challenge.</p>
<p>As for alums it’s a wash: NYU has John Paulson, Greenspan, Tisch, Freston, Langone, Robert Soros, Dick Fuld, Ferregamo, Golub, Kelleher- the founder of Southwest, Kleiner in KPCB etc.</p>
<p>Columbia has Buffet, Kravis, Cooperman, Pandit, Von Mueffling, Raanan Agus (head of Goldman Sachs proprietary trading), Mark McGoldrick (former head of Goldman Sachs prop), real estate exec. Speyer, and Carson in Welsh, Carson, Anderson, Stowe</p>
<p>I went to CBS, and loved it, but I am not sure it is “measurably superior to NYU-Stern”. The latest (2009) U.S. World News Report rankings don’t support this notion. CBS is ranked 9th and NYU Stern is ranked 11th with Yale sandwiched in between. Not worth losing sleep over.</p>
<p>well, while we’re on the subject of MBA programs, [check</a> out this spreadsheet I made](<a href=“http://www.ultimateaq.com/~tyriel/mba_comparison.xls]check”>http://www.ultimateaq.com/~tyriel/mba_comparison.xls).</p>
<p>In consulting, NYU has many fewer people coming from a top consulting background - the best firm they typically get people from is Deloitte or Accenture - and correspondingly few go into a top consulting firm afterwards.</p>
<p>In finance, NYU does rather poorly placing people on buyside jobs. Anyone who wants to can get an M&A or Capital Markets job from either school, sure, but at Columbia people have many more opportunities in PE, VC, hedge funds, investment mgmt or other buyside roles.</p>
<p>In terms of school resources, Columbia outpaces Stern by a mile - not just in research opportunities but in funding for clubs, housing quality and price, portion of tuition that pays for excursions or trips, faculty who get cited often in the news or WSJ, etc. Columbia offers more financial aid on average. I don’t have hard statistics on such things (they almost surely don’t exist), but anecdotally and having spent a lot of time at both places, those are all strong impressions i’ve gotten.</p>
<p>Columbia’s class size is also 2/3s larger than Stern’s (~750 to ~450), meaning it’s easier to find people with similar backgrounds and/or similar aspirations and learn from them and count on them as part of your future professional network.</p>
<p>Then you have the minor edge that Columbia enjoys in average GMAT score, undergrad GPA, etc.</p>
<p>Look, I’m a future Sternie here, but I do have to acknowledge that Columbia is measurably superior as an institution, and ranked 4th in various places (I don’t trust US News as far as I can throw it).</p>
<p>Yeah, good point PostBac, it’s not like the world has any need to cultivate people who are leaders with a strong vision of how the world should be and have the motivation, organizational skills and people skills to bring it to reality. We don’t need people who have been trained to see, think about and understand the forest rather than the trees. With companies containing hundreds of thousands of people, there’s no need for abstract understandings of how to optimally organize, market, analyze, price, transform or lead the corporations that produce the complex goods and services that drive our modern economy. Better we should all become farmers.</p>
<p>More seriously…</p>
<p>The central genius of capitalism is that, in search of greater returns for themselves, investors are incented to invest their capital in the most efficient manner possible. This means having the judgment, borne primarily of experience, in what is a proper and competent corporate management team, a proper operations strategy, technology strategy, marketing strategy, financing strategy, partnership strategy, etc. But that judgment is also borne of education, which ideally should help people avoid mistakes that have been made before, by learning from them, and if they do make mistakes, to make new ones (and thus contribute to the world’s knowledge). The ever-more-efficient allocation of capital that results is what has led our country and most developed countries to prosperity. Properly applied, the training of future business leaders - not just investors of course but the executors of those plans, too - creates wealth for everyone.</p>
<p>You’re talking about two very different issues - people having the emotional maturity and self-control to properly manage their finances, and separately, people having the proper training and instincts to properly perform functions within the financial world. The first is a personal issue, the second, a professional issue. Whether someone will be a good, say, management consultant totally does not bear on their ability to be financially stable. I knew people making small fortunes in consulting who did the job just to have the money to buy lots of shoes and dresses. People who, on a project or in a client meeting were absolutely brilliant at illustrating and synthesizing the key ideas that everyone needed to remember, at posing the key questions that people needed to answer, and at generating (or eliciting) optimal solutions to business problems. There is really no connection between the two. Your friends who have MBAs and live paycheck to paycheck either have Imelda Marcos as a girlfriend, or didn’t get that much out of an MBA, either through a bad program or a lack of initiative on their part. There may also be a selection bias - you may only encounter the ones who end up needing an accountant to help bail themselves out.</p>
<p>Your critique of MBAs in favor of “Liberal Arts” seems similarly ill-founded. The “Liberal Arts” disciplines are not the ones which fundamentally teach people how to “learn, refine, analyze and solve problems effectively”. You’re thinking of engineering or the sciences - or a business degree. History classes are fantastic introductions to the foundation and background of the world as we see it, but aside from teaching research skills, they didn’t exactly sharpen my mental pencil. All the sociology majors and women’s studies majors and east asian languages and cultures majors… you’re telling me these are the people best trained to crunch numbers and lead organizations?</p>
<p>If the people you meet with MBAs are “idiots”, either you’re hanging around the wrong business schools, or there’s something else clouding your judgment of people.</p>
<p>wow, why am i joining this debate - well cause of your small hit on liberal arts majors.</p>
<p>eng/sci/bus teaches you skills; lib arts (which actually includes sci/quant education) gives you perspective on how to utilize skillsets, to negotiate difficult circumstances and how to effectuate a technical answer. without ‘soft’ skills, you could have all the hard skills in the world and not be successful. </p>
<p>point is, you need both.</p>
<p>Columbia > NYU…period.</p>
<p>Now come on, Columbia is just like NYU…except good.</p>
<p>
The market is naturally cyclical. Markets are motivated by two human forces, greed and fear. They both ebb and flow.</p>
<p>
To do them successfully? No. To get a chance to do them, via a job offer? Yeah, probably. Ultimately finance, like business, is built on trust and relationships. A large firm chooses a banker to advise them on an M&A deal, or a startup chooses a banker to do an IPO or help them access the credit markets, based on having the relationship with those guys, and trusting them. If you don’t have those relationships and can’t build that trust, the world of high finance is not open to you. It’s not like a law firm where you can hang out your own shingle and acquire customers organically. You need a strong network.</p>
<p>Well, an MBA (like a top undergrad education) gives you that network. And it gives you the training to use it most effectively. And it gives you the skills such that people in that network can trust that you know what you’re doing. perhaps not all of them actually do, all of the time… but the average grad from a top MBA program is much more likely to succeed at such things, ceteris paribus.</p>
<p>
Why would you hire a guy off the street when you can hire an MBA and get much lower risk attached to that hire? Trading requires capital to trade - who’s going to give you that money? Stockbrokers work on behalf of a broker/dealer firm selling securities - who’s going to give you the client relationships? Sure, objectively speaking, these skills can be taught on the job. It’s not brain surgery. But we’re talking about masters of managing and balancing risk and return. Who’s more likely to make you money when you hire them, Joe Schmo or Joe MBA?</p>
<p>
Maybe they know something you don’t.</p>
<p>
A bad executive is a bad executive no matter what they got their college degree in. By the time they’re put in charge of a major company, their education is far, far behind them and their underlying character, people skills, and personality traits are much more evident - and much more important. And, if admissions officers at top MBA programs are doing their job well, those people skills, personality traits, and ethics are what is common among the students they admit to their program. Nothing is guaranteed in this world, but there are varying odds.</p>
<p>
Great. They hire all kinds of majors. They hire extremely smart people willing to bust their arse. I’m not sure what this is supposed to prove. I know a guy who never graduated high school, but his father ran a trading firm, got him a trading job at CSFB like ten years ago, and now he runs his own trading firm, trading treasuries. Yeah, he succeeded in his profession without formal education. Would you want to take those odds?</p>
<p>Columbia is better than NYU in every way imaginable save for proximity to the Village.</p>
<p>^unless you want to major in Failing at Life.</p>