<p>It’s difficult to imagine how someone who chose Columbia would regret not going to Princeton (and vice versa). On a day-to-day basis, they are polar opposite experiences. My Columbia son, from an affluent suburb, had no interest in Princeton, Stanford, Cornell, Dartmouth, etc. because each felt a bit too much like home. He has many, many friends who were very interested in those schools, for the very reason that they felt a bit like home.</p>
<p>One can analyze stereotypes of the two schools until the cows come home (Princeton’s snobbiness, undergraduate emphasis, etc. vs. Columbia’s disinterested administration, lack of campus life, etc.), but one spends every three of every four days of his or her life from age 18-22 at his or her college. Surely one can picture whether the suburban life of Princeton or the urban life of Columbia is the “right choice.”</p>
<p>confidentialcoll - thank you for your attacks on my friends and myself. I’m glad that you enjoyed Columbia and have a job coming out. Just as you are allowed the right to freely praise Columbia, I should enjoy the right to freely criticize it. Your last comment also doesn’t make much sense. </p>
<p>Many of my friends are pre-professional engineers who are put at a disadvantage when applying to medical or law school. Due to grade inflation in the college as well as the finite number of graduate schools spots offered to Columbia students, many of my friends are quite honestly screwed. Middle 50th in SEAS and middle 50th in CC are more than 1/3 of a letter grade off. A 3.4 in SEAS (about top 45%) is an automatic reject for medical schools. No consideration whatsoever. Talk about decisions you make when you’re 17 that screw you for the rest of your life. Sad but true.</p>
<p>I would also add that I would choose Princeton because of academic freedom. Don’t like engineering? Go study a liberal art. There is a deep dissatisfaction and feeling of being trapped in the engineering school among students. It’s extremely competitive and difficult to transfer among the college and SEAS. </p>
<p>I’m glad that you enjoyed your experience but keep your personal attacks to yourself. Contribute something meaningful instead of “you’re friends with prestige obsessed whores.”</p>
<p>Also, I don’t really understand why you say that you can interview with pretty much any industry you want. When you say any industry, do you mean investment banking and second-tier consulting firms? I don’t see much recruiting on our campus besides these two.</p>
<p>I’m glad that your alumni network is phenomenal. I’m sure that you and admissionsgeek were quite exceptional in maximizing your opportunity at Columbia. Sadly, you are more the exception than the norm. 20% of alumni attend reunions? Sounds like a terrible allegiance and alumni network. Princeton has students from 40-50 years ago attending reunions. That’s a vibrant and active alumni network.</p>
<p>Frankly, most students couldn’t care less about Columbia. I’m surprised to meet fairly socially outgoing and successful people who dislike/tolerate the school. Both of us had a WTH moment when we learned Kravis donated several hundred million to the business school.</p>
<p>Confidentialcoll- “amazed at how imbalanced and often socially ■■■■■■■■” </p>
<p>No offense there confidentialcoll but your comment is a bit ironic. You would think that someone more socially aware would seem to understand that calling people ■■■■■■■■ is a little passe.</p>
This is an absolutely ridiculous statement. Princeton has produced 10x as many Rhodes Scholars and dozens of more influential politicians and ambassadors than Columbia undergrad has. This is not to mention tech tycoons like Meg Whitman (Ebay) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) as well as investors like Carl Icahn.</p>
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Columbia and Princeton are not on par. Columbia is an incredible school but Princeton is the best undergraduate college on the planet. Columbia’s peers are the non-HYP Ivies, UChicago and Duke.</p>
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That’s a nice little speech but there’s a school that’s already broken the HYP grip and its called Stanford. If I were a betting man, I would put my money on Duke or Penn over Columbia.</p>
<p>Listen to beard tax, the most rational Columbian on this site, and stop trying to compare Columbia to Princeton. There are a lot of things that Columbia needs to improve on like resources/advising/funding before it can even approach Princeton’s level.</p>
<p>As a Columbia alum I have to agree. Columbia is full of bureaucracy, grad students teach way too many classes/ sections, some particularly science classes are HUGE, our physical infrastructure is in need of repair/ replacement (Hello Carman and McBain), our advising is non-existent, and we don’t have much alumni loyalty. We don’t have much in major grants or special undergrad programs except pre-entry programs like University scholars (shouldn’t every undergrad get this level of access and attention?). </p>
<p>I think Princeton has about 5 times the resources per student. I just don’t get glossy-eyed Columbians like admissionsgeek. I mean did you not see any of this??? We need much more in terms of resources to get up to the HYP level. This alone is why a school like Princeton can provide so much to their undergrads, they have the resources to do so. I loved the Core, and feel that it alone is a trump card for Columbia, but I can’t help but hear/ feel that students at top LACs or places like Dartmouth and Princeton get that level of attention in all their classes.</p>
<p>I’ve always felt that certain students, particularly those with a very specific program in mind such as music, benefit from Columbia because of New York (i.e. Lincoln Center access). I have friends who liked having a good film school around (again a very specific niche major). But for the vast majority of us majoring in studies like Philosophy or Econ, Columbia’s NYC location basically does nothing except detract from a feeling of community feeling or a real social life. </p>
<p>For Columbia to get up to HYP level we’re going to have to multiply our endowment, build many more undergraduate specific programs (like Dartmouth’s study abroad which my friends who went there rave about), and rebuild a lot of the physical plant (I am glad this is happening in some way now).</p>
<p>um I can see why you don’t think Columbia matches Princeton, and kinda see into your pessimism about Columbia breaking HYP grip, but you really think schools like Duke and Penn (GREAT SCHOOLS, dont get me wrong, duke was like my 3rd choice) have better chance of jumping into that HYP powerlock? Just curious</p>
<p>a) i was a scholar, which may or may not have colored my views re: resources; b) i was a heavily involved undergraduate that had very close relationships with administrators, students, student groups and all that had to offer; c) i did sponsored research (in a non physical science department) and had a very close relationship with multiple professors and many graduate students.</p>
<p>in the end my rosy-colored picture exists because my experience was pretty great, and better than expected. in part because i bought into what columbia has to offer and i see its strengths, in large part because i loved new york and the life of the city, but mostly because i never wanted columbia to be anything more than what it was- i didn’t want it to be pton or dmouth or a LAC (if i did i would’ve chosen the half dozen LACs i got into, only to find their teaching and strength of faculty to be worse than columbia’s). i liked being challenged by my peers, by the craziness of campus life, by the malaise that inevitably sets in when you live in ny too long. it was enthralling.</p>
<p>cce was tiny when i first went to columbia, but its budget has nearly tripled under dean sharma (the spec article on this is pretty good - [Give</a> CCE due credit](<a href=“http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2011/02/06/give-cce-due-credit]Give”>Give CCE due credit - Columbia Spectator)). the amount of expenditures per student at the ugrad level has steadily increased, as has alumni giving which has for 8 years in a row exceeded the annual giving targed and vaulted columbia from low 20s in alumni giving to nearly equaling that of most schools (especially direct peers in terms of size being stanford/harvard/penn) if even not quite at dmouth and pton levels.</p>
<p>but i am also very realistic about columbia and what it can and should do. unlike you i don’t think the answer is in study abroad opportunities or the dartmouth plan (we aren’t dartmouth, our university isn’t in the middle of nowhere). you can’t have the core (which is one of the most expensive enterprises out there, and considered one of the best teacher training programs in the country making columbia grad students better teachers than almost any other institution) and spend tons of money on study abroad. i think international education is important, but i tend to side with the SEAS dean here and see if you can’t make it so every student goes abroad for a summer and concentrate resources there than push for every student to go during the school year.</p>
<p>but as i said i am also probably more excited about columbia because of what is happening. if you follow the numbers and reorganization the way i have, there is a lot to be excited about. the amount of new money coming into the university, the way it has repositioned cc/seas at the center of the university. small things like the quigley endowment that often go unnoticed which are quickly giving undergrads today far more than we ever had. is it enough? not yet. but that is what continues to be exciting. imagine the university in 5 years when the b-school, sipa and soa are up in manhattanville and you have all that space to play with down at the mo-heights campus. there is a lot of untapped potential the uni and the ugrad schools are just tapping into. </p>
<p>at a certain point rationality goes out the window and you just have to choose to believe in something, an image or a fiction. we take all this data we see, facts and information, and in reality it is impossible for us to compare columbia and princeton. they are different institutions, with different strengths and goals. i would never want princeton to be columbia and vice versa. therefore the idea that somehow princeton is better than columbia, especially when so much raw data as well as anecdotal evidence could contradict that assertion, we ultimately have to choose to believe what reality we want. at times that involves projecting a past image onto the present - heritage, prestige and tradition. at times that involves projecting a future image - opportunity, possibility. regardless of what trope we use ultimately we choose how to handle this data - uneven measures that never line up correctly (you can’t compare the wonders of nyc to the wonders of more money per pupil, the two are different scales), and we decide where our emotions lie. </p>
<p>you needn’t be as rosy as i am, but you shouldn’t take your own agency out of the picture. ultimately you are allowed to be as irrational and future focused as i am about columbia. or you can try to jam a tiger vision into a lion world.</p>
Columbia procuded 10x more Nobel laureates than Princeton. Columbia also produced 4-5 US presidents and princeton produced only one.</p>
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<p>According to Billiionaire University rankinby by Forbes, Columbia is #3 and Princeton is probably not even top 10. Wall Street is dominated by Columbia graduates as well. </p>
<p>Citi Bank CEO, Mongan Stanley CEO, one of the largest shareholder of Goldman Sach are Columbia Graduate ( warren buffet ) Princeton graduates not well respresentes at top management level at Wall Street. </p>
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The quality of Princeton undergrad students is below HY Columbia Stanford MIT Caltech.
Look at Princeton’s Alumni, who are not simply as impressive as HY Columbia Stanford MIT Caltech.</p>
<p>More resources are availabe for Columbai undergrads when applying for grad schools.
There are about 5x more Columbia undergrads at Columbia Law Med Business PhD programs because very strong preferences are given to Columbia undergrads. </p>
<p>Since Columbia Alumnus are more impressive and successful than Princeton grads, greate resources and opportunities are available for Columbia grad when applying for jobs</p>
<p>Columbia degree offers more opportunity than Princeton degree.</p>
<p>Many of the billionaires on Forbes list as well as Wall Street professionals graduated from Columbia Business School, not from the undergraduate schools. The notable exception is Vikram Pandit, who graduated from SEAS with an EE degree as well as a Ph. D in finance.</p>
<p>In terms of the law school and business school, I think that the graduate schools actually don’t give preference to undergraduates. The most well represented schools at CBS are unsurprisingly UPenn and Harvard by a wide margin. This is what I’ve heard as anecdotal evidence though CBS is trying to recruit more students from its own undergraduate schools. </p>
<p>Once again, Nobel Laureates don’t have much to do with the quality of the undergraduate experience. Neither Stiglitz, Mundell, Phelps, etc. teach economics. The only superstar economist who teaches is Xavier Sala-i-Martin, who has a 300 person lecture. </p>
<p>This point is highly debatable, but I feel that the majority of Columbia alumni don’t care about the school or undergraduates once they leave. Columbia students tend to be more independent and attached to NYC rather than the school or campus. The administration and bureaucracy engender quite a bit of dislike and annoyance. Columbia students don’t feel as if the CCE, SDA, OMA, etc. (you get the point, lots of separate administrations) are here to help, but rather here to do the bare minimum so they don’t get fired. </p>
<p>Once again, I think Columbia has had a wider impact on the world because it’s a bigger school than Princeton and has law, business, social work, education, IR, etc. programs. If these resources came together and supported undergraduates, then Columbia would be a better environment. As it currently is, Princeton is hands down a better undergraduate experience. I don’t know about Princeton, but the secretaries and administrators in the Registrar and the Center for Student Advising are outright mean. They’ve made fun of me for mishearing a question and will treat you incredibly rudely. The advisors and administrators are generally nice, but the system at Columbia just doesn’t work well when it comes to supporting student groups and campus life events.</p>
<p>Its seems to me that perhaps you are an International student given your English. I believe that International students sometimes have a very different understanding of undergraduate quality, only because in the rest of the world graduate and undergrad quality is usually interchangeable. This isn’t the case in the US, here they often are very different animals. Many of the numbers you cite reflect graduate student quality, not undergraduate quality (example Warren Buffet and James Gorman of Morgan Stanley went to Columbia Business School not Columbia Undergrad!)</p>
<p>Not that this means that research Universities can’t do well, but they often don’t do as well as someone not as used to the US system might think. Grad schools can be an asset, but they also can be a distraction absorbing resources away from undergrads. </p>
<p>As for Columbia’s legacy on Wall Street, it isn’t better than Princeton (not that its that much worse, we’re talking about two of the best schools in the US - both are feeders). If anything the top 3 schools are Harvard, Princeton, Wharton with Dartmouth, MIT, Stanford then Columbia and Yale right after this group. This I know from Direct experience and pretty much every experienced person in finance on these boards agrees with this.</p>
<p>As someone who has attended Columbia on two occasions, I do agree with almamater’s assessment that Columbia lacks in some undergraduate focused qualities that certain students might very much appreciate. That said once again any Ivy puts you in the running to do almost anything so whether its undergrad focused Princeton/Dartmouth or research oriented Columbia/Harvard we’re talking about the best schools in the world. Doors will be open for you.</p>
<p>i don’t think xavier is quite a superstar either. until he publishes something new he is living in robert barro’s shadow.</p>
<p>your anecdotal evidence about cbs seems off just from my own encounters with cbs, including talking with admissions people. i haven’t heard it is wharton or harvard biased, and like columbia law and columbia med the largest cohort each year is usually made up of columbia students.</p>
<p>as for billionaire alums - most are cbs folks this is true, but what about the likes of kraft, kluge and speyer, all self-made billionaires, all graduates of columbia college. and perhaps even add randy lerner, whose dad (another cc alum) created the empire that he inherited and has since gone on to diversify. </p>
<p>chalfie has students work for him in his lab. stiglitz takes on students in his research group. mundell or phelps alternate leading a senior year course (phelps is teaching it this year). stormer teaches undergraduates, and for a few years led physics 1400 (and has students in his lab). kandel has undergrads working for him in his lab. pamuk co-taught a seminar for senior comp lit majors last fall. </p>
<p>but they are they are but a drop in the bucket of amazing profs that columbia has that are in fact hands on and accessible. my music hum teacher was president of the american ethnomusicology association; my lithum teacher is one of the leading philosophers of aesthetics in the world. perhaps not in the money disciplines - they are nevertheless creme de la creme of their own.</p>
<p>Well. Columbia is in the best city in the world and Princeton is in…new jersey. Princeton is my dream school but as far as location goes, Columbia wins by far.</p>
<p>NYC is a great city, but is it the right place for college? The total lack of community compared to a place like Princeton wasn’t worth the trade-off personally. And Princeton is one of the most beautiful towns in the US. Adding to this Princeton is maintained to one of the best standards of any school anywhere with gardens, fountains, beautiful facilities, and classrooms. Columbia is in dire need of a re-modeling. I swear my room in Ruggles should have been condemned.</p>
<p>Adding to this. I think it comes down to what is good for you personally. On one side you’ll find its defenders such as Admissionsgeek and confidentialcoll and others. On the other side you will find those who were put off by its faults including myself, beard tax, truazn and others. I believe that to say Columbia is a polarizing experience is fair. I think one has to see whether its the right place for them.</p>
<p>alma - any experience could be polarizing! including princeton. i know many people who hated it. they considered it incredibly isolating, couldn’t make friends in that culture. question: is the united states objectively a great country? ask that the world over and tell me you’ll find a single answer.</p>
<p>part of being ‘fair,’ and i welcome the fact that you found faults with columbia, is a realization that your experience is a ‘possible outcome’ and not representative. it also means not edifying any other experience. that is and has always been my point on here.</p>
<p>because using words like ‘total lack of community’ is false, i mean intuitively and evidentially false. i could throw back into your face that columbia’s urban campus is often lauded as the best maintained urban landscape among other accolades it has garnered. microarguments that are meant not to undermine your worldview, but to hopefully help people recognize that the visceral attack you make on columbia is one-sided…and then let the student decide who to believe.</p>
<p>what your argument ultimately comes down to is what does a student want his/her college experience to be like, and what is the most conducive experience for personal and professional growth. at times both of these answers might be obvious to a student, but usually it is not (we pretend we know what we want, but often it is the reflection of things that other people have told us). when you are deciding in april which school to attend there is no perfect science that will tell you where to go and what is the ‘right’ place. ultimately it is based on feel, a calculated guess.</p>
<p>but when you do end up at columbia and not princeton, the point is not to somehow dream and wish that you could’ve attended another school, but to find within your own experience everything you could’ve ever wanted. small things at times shape our memories of experiences - a break-up is enough to make us hate something in an irrational manner; a bad experience with a teacher; being recognized is enough to make us love an experience despite its faults. it is in part chance, and in part the domain of personal imagination/opinion. </p>
<p>it’s what lets me be so positive about columbia…and yet not be wrong.</p>
<p>hey…I don’t really want to read through 8 pages of replies, but I just thought that you should know that you can’t apply to Princeton early…they got rid of their early admissions option a while back. That said, you can apply to Columbia early as it’s ED.</p>