<p>i mean we could talk about why this is the case, but it is pretty clear that columbia lived off of its professor reputations moreso than any other school. probably because its professors were at a moment more recognizable than any single academic unit. since the 80s, columbia has been adapting to the new status quo of what unis should look like.</p>
<p>but what we should note is that the idea somehow that prestige of your undergrad school matters is really a recent phenomenon. people would go to yale not because it was more prestigious, but because there were fewer colleges back then, and that is what you did if you were a blue blood from westchester. to folks it wasn’t yale v. columbia and harvard, it was yale or bust. it wasn’t until the expansion of classes, the inclusion of women, the rising cost of operating a univeristy (hence the need for high tuition and high donor giving), culminating in the USNews rankings, did undergrad prestige at some point become what we consider today to be the status quo. i’d say it wasn’t until the 80s did this stuff begin to matter, at which point hyp had a huge leg up on the competition. at that point, columbia was a commuter school, brown was a regional school for kids who couldn’t get into harvard. amherst and williams had their tiny niches, and most folks wouldn’t had heard of swarthmore and haverford if they didn’t live in philadelphia.</p>
<p>i think if we realize just how new this status quo is, we avoid the pretense that schools passing hyp is impossible, or that this is how it has always been. they had a product that mapped perfectly into the usnews expectations, and the resources to make that product better. but for most of the 20th century the question of what was the best uni and what was the best undergrad were not quite linked - the best unis were clearly harvard, columbia, berkeley, jhu and uchicago. the question of what was the best undergrad seemed more partisan than quantifiable.</p>