<p>I'm an accepted student to the Class of 2018, and Columbia's Core is actually one of my favorite aspects of the school. However, I've seen some articles about how Columbia is struggling to have faculty teach the core classes. I'm not that interested in taking most of my classes from graduate students. Can any current/past students/parents weigh in on this issue with their experience with the core professors/teachers? </p>
<p>Generally it’s a bad idea to relate quality of teaching to whether the teacher is a graduate student or full professor, at least at Columbia. By that I mean there are plenty of grad students that really excel at teaching, especially discussion/student interaction based liberal arts and humanities classes; on the other hand a lot of professors can be terrible even if they have a higher powered degree. </p>
<p>That being said, Columbia core is a tossup in terms of teaching quality. I’ll weigh in on the humanities side of the core (LitHum, CC, ArtHum, MusicHum, UW), as the non humanities side/global core side you have a lot more options in terms of classes as you actually get to pick. At Columbia my personal experience is 50/50 with grad students and professors, maybe leaning more heavily towards grad students. Sometimes you get excellent teachers, sometimes they are terrible. Given that humanities classes are often graded with some subjectivity it can be an annoying experience, but I don’t think this is different for any other university. I haven’t found full time professors to be much different in terms of teaching quality on average.</p>
<p>One of the issues is coming into the school as a freshman if I remember correctly, you can’t actually pick your section. At some point (maybe second semester freshman year or first semester sophomore year), they let you pick the section but they don’t give you a professor name, so you basically have to trial and error. There is also the issue that even when you do get a professor name, there are so many core teachers (a lot of grad students), that its hard to use something like CULPA or word of mouth to figure out how good of teachers they are. I think these factors contribute to me thinking the core teaching quality as a tossup more so than non-core classes I’ve taken as they can sometimes be out of your control.</p>
<p>Take my opinion for what it is but keep in mind I’m not a humanities person, did not come to Columbia for the core, and I’m probably not in love with it as much as your typical Columbia student. </p>