<p>this is i think a big question... the rankings are ALWAYS similar popularwise and usnews-wise (although this has changed recently)</p>
<p>what is better at which programs/subjects? and prestige-wise from the neighborhoods youa'll come from?</p>
<p>liberal arts and engineering wise CU is superior to Upenn.
it's the wharton school that stands out</p>
<p>It's actually extremely ignorant to say that business is the only thing that stands out at penn...</p>
<p>Penn has one of the top Bioengineering programs in the country, and will soon complete the building of a new tens-of-millions of dollars Bioengineering facility.</p>
<p>Penn also has extremely reputable programs in English, History, Linguistics(the person who invented the discipline of Sociolinguistics in here)...</p>
<p>And let's not forget the Anthropology and Archaeology programs, which are housed at the renowned Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.</p>
<p>Depends on what you want to major. Prestige definitely weighs in Columbia's favor, but the prestige will not really affect your employment prospects or make you happy in either location. Visit both schools, and go with your intuition.</p>
<p>quake 87, i didn't say wharton was the only thing that stands out... i was speaking relative to CU. Maybe i was wrong. but avoid extreme words, cuz it makes you look ignorant</p>
<p>prestige in columbia's favor.... really?</p>
<p>upenn has a business/med/eng school
ALL three more well known than columbia</p>
<p>hmm...</p>
<p>gregofj, but it's true that columbia is better known than upenn
engineering school wise, columbia's definitely better, it's ranked higher, and smarter kids get in there
all my students who went to upenn got either defered from ED to CU SEAS, or rejected from CU SEAS RD.</p>
<p>vgboy, i'm sorry if that's not what you were implying, but it seemed like it...</p>
<p>But to generalize and say that liberal arts and engineering at Columbia is better than at Penn is, I'm sorry to say, kind of ignorant. Both schools have excellent reputations in in the liberal arts/social sciences/humanities...I'll give you that Fu has a larger number of highly-ranked and established programs than Penn SEAS, but you ignore looking at specific programs.</p>
<p>And Columbia is better known to the general public than Penn is, but in professional and academic circles they both enjoy stellar reputations.</p>
<p>you might also want to consider acceptance rates, columbia has a pretty low one (this year ~ 9.6%) and penn last year was ~21% , maybe its like 17 or 18% this year? either way, it seems, on the overall scale, "tougher" to get into columbia (though i got in and didn't get into penn, n im sure this is the case with other people)</p>
<p>i feel like the lower acceptance rate might reflect a different type of person being accepted to columbia. i know that partly because of these types of people and also because of nyc, columbia is definitely more politically active than penn. the allure of nyc also attracts more and bigger-named speakers to columbia. </p>
<p>columbia's poli sci dept is #1 in the world "technically." their physics dept is also supposed to be amazing, don't know the stat though.</p>
<p>i'm sure penn has great depts too, it seems like the residential college thing there and the less-powerful city leaves some more life on campus at penn than at columbia. im sure penn parties on campus are much better than those at columbia, and theres definitely more school spirit at penn in terms of sports and stuff</p>
<p>i have to say, all of this argument seems sort of useless. They're both great schools, with great programs. if you are lucky enough to get into both of those schools, you really need to visit a feel each one out. and whichever one fits you better is better for you.</p>
<p>sure columbia has a lower acceptance rate, and penn has a higher us news rank, but when it comes down to it, they're both extremely famous, extremely good schools. after all, they're ivy league.</p>
<p>each program has its positives and its negatives. it all depends on which one you like better. each school has top notch professors and high quality education, you really can't go wrong with either school.</p>
<p>i know because i've been accepted to both penn and columbia engineering. i've been doing all this statistical research and blah blah blah. and to tell you, both are ranked the same, the biomedical engineering program (which i'm going into) is ranked higher in penn than in columbia, but i'm going to columbia. why? because in either school, i'll know i'll get a good education and that my 47 grand a year will be worth it. i just like nyc better than philly.</p>
<p>so i guess to argue which one is better is sort of pointless. it varies from person to person and each is entitled to his or her opinion. you really can't say whehter one is better, or one is worse, or one is better than the other at programs or subjects or prestige or whatever. they are virtually the same and it really depends on your opinions.</p>
<p>i think i was repetitive.</p>
<p>ADMIT RATES ARE FUZZY pENN 17% THIS YEAR VS COLUMBIA 10%.
pENN HAS LARGER CLASS AND IT COMPETES WITH hyp WHARTON CLASS,
iT COMPETES WITH mit, cmu sTANFORD, cOLUMBIA FOR eNGINEERING.</p>
<p>oTHERS HAVE COMMON APPLICATION, SO THEY GET EXTRA APPS AND THAT LOWERS THE RATES, IF YOU DO THAT TO PENN RATES WILL DROP BELOW 15% RIGHT WAY. THEN PENN HAS NURSING SCHOOL WHRER IT HAS 40% RATE, IF YOU EXCLUDE THAT IT WILL BE AROUND 14% FOR PENN.</p>
<p>cOLUMBIA SELECT IT SELF WITHOUT MUCH(SMALL) CROSS ADMIT WITH hyp, BUT MORE WITH BROWN , penn, nyu, gTOWN. tHOSE WHO WANT TO GO nyc THEN IT IS NOT GOOD FOR COLUMBIA. </p>
<p>tHOSE WHO GO PENN REALLY WANT TO BE AT PENN( CAMPUS LIFE IS GREAT), PHILLY IS JUST A BONUS.</p>
<p>you should hesitate to use admit rates as a basis for your argument. columbia is considerably smaller than penn, while the number of applications it gets is only slightly lower than penn does. and even IF columbia were much more selective, why should selectivity play a large role in a school's prestige? did you know that cooper union is more selective than MIT? and a bunch of LACs and state schools are harder to get into than Uchicago?</p>
<p>I agree with what somebody said above: both schools enjoy stellar reputations.
I think the only reason the general public knows more about Columbia is because Penn is at a disadvantage because of its name: anyone not obsessed with the Ivy League thinks it's Penn State. Shame they didn't name the school Franklin. It flows nicely: Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Franklin...etc.</p>
<p>Franklin still sounds like the odd one out, and not just because it's not the actual name.</p>
<p>Penn was almost an Ivy safety until 2000ish with the (Penn) class of 2003-2004, when it shifted USNEWS ranks and started its upward momentum. That is its barrier, not the name. Influential people older than 25 still see it as a relative safety. That said, in this age the prestige difference between Brown, Penn, Dartmouth, Columbia, Duke, and Amherst is moot - all are great schools - choose on fit. As someone who has attended two of the above schools I can tell you that arguments like Penn or Columbia based on prestige are ridiculous. Do you choose a Lexus over a Porsche because it ARGUABLY has 2 more horsepower? Nope. Neither should you choose between these based on prestige.</p>
<p>penn has top rated business school, Top rated med school, top rated Law school, ranked #2 NIH grants and top rated bio engineering school.
What else you want.</p>
<p>except the thing is, using admit rates is fine in this case. it becomes problematic when you compare a liberal arts school with a research university, but when comparing 2 universities like these, it's fair game.</p>
<p>selectivity matters because columbia's politically charged student body is a testament to the fact that culturally and politically conscious people opt to go there. this is a critical reason why people who are accepted to princeton/harvard/yale may choose columbia, coming from small-town backgrounds themselves or simply wanting an active campus.</p>
<p>penn has its benefits too, uniquely school spirit. the fact that both schools get alot of applicants , and yet columbia's acceptance rate is still 1/2 of penn's can't be ignored. we can roughly say that most people who apply to columbia also apply to penn and the opposite holds true as well. but FEWER people pass columbia's admissions screening, and columbia does make an effort to find people who match its own love for tradition, culture, and politics. the people who attend, therefore, almost always exemplify some of the biggest intellectuals - in the sense of cultural and politicalawareness- in the ivy league.</p>
<p>Far too many people on this site focus on admit ratios. That's a naive and very one dimensional metric.</p>
<p>Admit ratios can be gamed, and even if they aren't they dont tell the entire (or even most relevant) story.</p>
<p>It's easy to game the admit ratio; simply overcount apps (e.g., include prelim and incomplete apps from students in the total count - it's alleged that WUStL and Columbia do this). you can also aggressively use the waitlist, which allows a school to advertise (if only early on) artificially low admit rates.</p>
<p>Either way, all these schools are sourcing from the same global pool of students -- the top Ivies all get 20-23K applications. The size of a freshman class impacts the selectivity. The larger schools simply look less selective.<br>
Cornell - 3000 students; Penn - 2400; Harvard - 1700; Yale - 1400; Columbia - 1350; Brown - ~1450; Dartmouth ~1000</p>
<p>That says NOTHING about the quality of their student body. Atlantic Monthly ranked the schools factoring in SAT scores, admit rates, adjusted for various factors -- although a bit dated, here's their ranking. Much more valid than anything i've seen on this site.</p>
<p>1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1861) 16% 12% 28% 1420 1560 99% 2
2 Princeton University (1746) 11% 31% 10% 11% 1380 1560 95% 3
3 California Institute of Technology (1891) 21% 19% 31% 1470 1580 99% 1
4 Yale University (1701) 13% 26% 13% 13% 1370 1560 95% 5
5 Harvard University (1636) 11% 11% 10% 1400 1570 90% 4
6 Stanford University (1891) 13% 23% 13% 13% 1350 1540 88% 6
7 Columbia University (1754) 12% 31% 13% 10% 1320 1510 84% 7
8 University of Pennsylvania (1740) 21% 39% 20% 22% 1330 1500 91% 9
9 Brown University (1764) 17% 27% 18% 16% 1290 1500 87% 8
10 Swarthmore College (1864) 24% 43% 28% 21% 1350 1530 90% 11 </p>
<p>A more important metric (especially for "prestige" junkies and determining the overall attractiveness of a school to incoming students) is regular decision yield. RD yield excludes the effects of early decision and ideally reduces the impact of financial aid differences btwn colleges. </p>
<p>Est RD data (from other sites ) :</p>
<p>Harvard- 70-72%;
Yale-58-60%;
Stanford-55-57%;
Princeton-52-54%;
Penn 50-52%;
Brown - 45-47%;
Columbia 42-45%;
Dartmouth -40%;
Cornell 38-40% </p>
<p>And finally, this tells something about a school along one dimension. Cornell is last here, but near the top re R&D, research impact, scholarly producitivity etc. Same for Penn and Columbia even compared to yale and Princeton.</p>
<p>slipper's advice is getting lost in the shuffle about ranking algorithms and prestige.</p>
<p>"choose based on fit" means meet some current students, visit and have an open mind about the atmosphere, and look at what the school is truly the best in the world at (and how well that meshes with your interests). You'll be a lot happier if you're at a place where the students are, by and large, more like you. There are definite differences in personality and attitudes, but you have to visit and meet people and get a feel for that, nobody can really describe it for you. For example, one of the many reasons I loved Columbia is that I felt like its students took themselves less seriously than some of its peer schools. Can I articulate why I feel that way, or prove it as fact to anyone else? No, of course not. It's a general impression, which while flawed I found to be borne out by 4 years' experience.</p>
<p>You should do the same for yourself if you find yourself with a choice like "Columbia or Penn?".</p>
<p>Re: admit rates.</p>
<p>Penn's ~17% admit rate refers to the entire undergraduate university. Columbia's ~9% acceptance rate is for the College. They conveniently place SEAS (~25%?) in its own category. Not sure how big of an impact that actually has, but it is something to note when you compare CC to other schools like Penn and Cornell which have seperate colleges with higher acceptance rates that are factored into the acceptance rate that the public sees.</p>