<p>Can you be more specific with your assertion that Columbia College’s reputation is what Columbia U’s grad programs live off of? </p>
<p>Sounds a bit sketchy to me considering how prominent Columbia’s grad programs have been involved in much groundbreaking research across multiple disciplines ranging from Physics to East Asian Studies over the last several decades and into the present. From that along with having interacted with members of the Columbia U community at many levels…it seems the undergrad college is living off the reputation of the grad programs.</p>
<p>It’s an absurd idea. The College is nice, and its been increasing in prestige over the years, but it’s still the grad programs that give Columbia its cachet. For most of the 20th century, all the focus was on the grad programs. As adgeek will no doubt tell you, that’s changed a lot in the last 10-15 years, as the administration (especially under PrezRupp) started focusing much more heavily on the College. Still, though, Columbia gets at least as much prestige from their grad programs as from their undergrad programs. We are still the anti-Princeton.</p>
<p>Out of curiosity, are comments like the one by “smart guy” an indication of disdain towards grad students exhibited by some among Columbia College/ugrad Engineering or other Ivy undergrads?</p>
<p>Just curious as I recalled a few cartoons in Columbia student publications indicating as such…including one which depicts the grad students as poorly clothed/fed paupers hanging around Columbia while the poshly dressed undergrads are eyeing them nervously or something.</p>
<p>With the possible exception of the business, medical and law schools, which have big reputations on their own, what other programs are seen as being as prestigious on campus? I mean, I am as a big a CU booster as they come (hate these p*ssing matches), but c’mon, the college is the division with the most history and largely why the university is what it is…</p>
<p>You’ll see the grad programs boast that they are part of the ivy league, when it really is a sports conference played by the college kids… ;-)</p>
<p>The college has by far the most prominent alumni anyway…</p>
<p>smart guy - imagine if columbia had been better toward the college over the course of the 20th century, and we could also imagine the university having an even greater reputation.</p>
<p>for most of the 20th century no single division i’d say was considered to be the agent of columbia’s fortune, but the general perception that columbia had coalesced the single greatest pantheon of professors throughout all disciplines. for awhile they had the premiere historians (hofstadter, barzun), the premiere literary critic (lionel trilling), deans in the world of chemistry and physics, the precursor to the chicago school. FDRs brain trust was primarily from columbia. c. wright mills was the most influential sociologist of the middle 20th century based at columbia. many exiles after the war got their start at columbia. columbia had widely considered the best philosophy department, english department, history, physics, chemistry and economics - by a long shot.</p>
<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>
<p>@adgeek re: professors, We also had Arthur Danto, the premier art critic and philosopher of art.</p>
<p>@adgeek re: schools, how prestigious is TC? I know that a lot of great NYC teachers end up getting their masters in education there, but I’ve heard different things about the quality. I don’t know if it’s just a result of the low prestige of the education as a discipline in general, or if it’s specific to TC.</p>
<p>banned: will always? do you also mean it was always - because it wasn’t always. and intuitively if it wasn’t always, it can’t always be.</p>
<p>pwoods: i kept on thinking about adorno for some reason, and could never get danto off my tongue. haha, thanks for helping.</p>
<p>tc is kind of what is wrong with education schools in general, in my opinion, it is very highly respected, but the education itself is kind of middling. many teachers believe it is too theoretical, so it at times is not the most sought after for its teacher training. but what it is is highly influential. the models it has developed are followed throughout the world. and along with peabody, harvard and stanford, a degree from TC is fast track to some kind of well known policy position. but the bigger issue i have found from talking to a friend who went there has to do with the quality of students. TC gets the best of the best, but as she points out, you have students that have difficulty keeping up with the work that she considers high school equivalent. its hard for her to feel invested in her classes when it takes two weeks to read a short book.</p>
<p>this is a bigger critique i have of graduate school period, especially coming from columbia, is that instead of feeling it to be more challenging than college, it is a common complaint i find that it is less challenging, especially in more policy oriented areas. my friends doing public policy degrees agree there, folks doing ed degrees have said the same. about the only folks in grad school that i hear complaining are medical fields and law. in a sense you are paying for a degree, and not an education. you wont learn all that much, you wont struggle all that much. it is not the rigorous intellectual experience you would be used to coming from a top flight undergrad experience.</p>
<p>Out of curiosity, do you find this complaint about Columbia grad schools being not as challenging mainly from students who attended SLACs or also topflight universities? </p>
<p>A few college classmates/friends who attended SIPA have ranted about how many American-born SIPA classmates whined endlessly of the “heavy reading loads” of 300+ pages/week per course when the former group experienced similar reading loads as undergrads at SLACs or some topflight universities. Have a neighbor who also ranted about the same type of whining from the SIPA students she worked with as their course TA. </p>
<p>@pwoods: From what I’ve heard from dozens of grad students and even some high school teachers I’ve had, there is a common perception that the field of education tends to mostly attract those whose undergrad records were mediocre to middling at best. Even some friends who attended TC and Harvard School of Ed have remarked at how they were viewed by fellow grad students in other divisions…admittedly with some justification as being the least competitive grad students on their respective campuses.</p>