<p>cornell is plenty prestigious, but if you want a school with prestige, just go higher up the rankings… that’s all.</p>
<p>I predict it’ll remain highly prestigious (the Ivy League isn’t going anywhere)–> especially in the sciences and engineering. However, I think its biggest disadvantage is its location. There is something symbolically confining about it. </p>
<p>A poster in another thread spoke about how classroom experience and research are not proving as central in importance to prospective students as compared with the value of establishing a strong base and set of connections to a thriving city particularly in this era of globalization (examples: Los Angeles for entertainment or DC for politics), having easy access to internships (year-round as complements to their classwork, and not just during summers), networking, etc…</p>
<p>I would also argue that students are increasingly looking towards having access to professors, mentors, and members of academia who combine their academic credentials with applied, real-world experience and real-world jobs/positions –> and not just full-time academics with boast of PhDs and papers in select journals only read in faculty circles. </p>
<p>My sister chose Georgetown over Cornell for those kinds of reasons.</p>
<p>I’m not going to knock on Georgetown, but I’d love to know where one could get good information about those things before actually attending a school, among other things.</p>
<p>Symbolically confining … is a hard characterization to swallow if you’ve stood on the top of East Hill and admired the soaring vistas, watched the moon set over the lake, driven along Cayuga towards Aurora …</p>
<p>To be at Cornell is to feel as if you are at the top of the world, caught in a veritable energy vortex of learning and passion.</p>
<p>To believe that Ithaca is confining only illuminates the shortsighted view of the world held by urban chauvinists.</p>
<p>…I think this is exactly the strength of Cornell. The [professors know what they are getting into, most have had a career outside of Cornell but fall in love with the utopia of it’s culture. They are there with both feet, unlike some of the examples used by Pixie, of profs actively dualing their teaching career with other professional careers. Perhaps it’s just one of those things that you can’t realy understand until you experience it. This has been linked in other threads but really gives a “feel” for what Cornell is all about. Video is a tribute by two graduating seniors : [This</a> Is on Vimeo](<a href=“http://vimeo.com/23897683]This”>http://vimeo.com/23897683)</p>
<p>Well, beautiful views or not, the reality is that urban schools have a far easier time attracting and retaining quality professors and students (especially now that new generations desire urban lifestyles over suburban / rural) and attracting media attention (how often do you see lazy media go down the street for a professor’s perspective from Columbia or NYU?). It’s simply far easier for a professor to live in a major metropolitan area and have access to good schools for children, employment opportunities for a spouse, and cultural amenities that a smaller city - even one as great as Ithaca - simply cannot provide.</p>
<p>Other schools have surged in reputation over the past decade, but I think the current leadership is making some smart, bold moves without pandering to arbitrary rankings. The $4 billion campaign should at least stabilize the university’s capacity to compete and hopefully shrink class size, the primary factor that keeps Cornell undergrad out of top 10 rankings - its grad school rankings are very solid overall. The streamlining due to the economic downturn has been needed for quite some time. </p>
<p>The revamped applied economics program will probably pay reputation dividends as students get into the business world. Let’s hope they don’t lose the “applied” part and end up with a bunch of alums shuffling fake money around Wall Street when they could be building solid businesses that provide actual products and services. </p>
<p>Lastly, Cornell’s focus on expanding its presence in New York City can only help. If you’re not familiar, the administraton’s currently pushing hard to be chosen by NYC to build a large graduate / research CorrnellNYC campus on Roosevelt Island focused on developing new technologies and launching new businesses in New York City. Seemingly as a broadside against Columbia, the mayor stated the city lacks a top-ranked engineering program and they’re looking to provide free space and capital to help develop one in the city so they can compete with Silicon Valley. </p>
<p>On the down side, Stanford is one of the other applicants - really the gold standard of academic-to-industry transfer. On the up side, Cornell’s no slouch in physics / engineering / life sciences and is the land grant university for New York State with a strong presence in the city already. So, there’s a very natural fit. If chosen, Cornell could begin to build an east coast reputation for tech start-ups in the way Stanford has out west.</p>
<p>If Cornell was mainly interested in the higher ratings game, here’s one thing they could do: reduce admissions! Cornell hasn’t gone to its waitlist in YEARS and sometimes has more freshmen than they were planning for. MANY school ranked higher than them do go to their waitlists, because they know better how to play that game. Cornell just doesn’t seem interested in that.</p>
<p>I don’t see Cornell’s lack of interest in “playing the game” as negative, because there are a lot of things about “the game” that are ridiculous. Some schools go so far as to heavily recruit students they know won’t make it through admissions just to keep their acceptance rate low. Perhaps if they’re enrolling more freshman than they’d like, something needs to change, but hopefully the obsession most high ranked schools have with that little percentage number won’t make them deny students they otherwise would have admitted.</p>
<p>Because Cornell offers in-state tuition in certain of their programs, and because it is almost impossible to get into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton anyway, Cornell is likely to always attract the tip top students from New York State.</p>
<p>…“In-state” tuition is misinterpreted by some to mean “SUNY tuition”. Total cost for the contract colleges is approx. $40,000. Approx. $55,000 for the endowed schools. At our income bracket we got nothing for the contract colleges but would have gotten around $15,000 for the endowed. So for our D, even being in-state the cost would have been approx. equal.</p>
<p>Professors here are so nice! I’m already doing research (legit, not beaker washing) with a professor I don’t have a class with.
There’s usually a lower quality of teaching in the intro courses, but office hours make up for it.
Since everyone’s stuck in isolated Ithaca, they focus all their time to the university.</p>
<p>Big school, but as long as you have the charisma to get in here, you’ll go far.</p>
<p>^ “isolated Ithaca”? Let us know how you feel about that in a couple years. Neither of my sons felt isolated and they have always been kids who had great exposure to NYC. I guess it is just perspective.</p>
<p>Oh, I don’t mean “isolated” as in there’s nothing to do. It’s just that there’s no direct city part-time jobs distracting the professors as there is in the city colleges.</p>
<p>The university has great connections to NYC, mhm.(I really hope they get the tech campus bid) I came from NYC to Cornell for that reason - I went to Career Fair and there were so many internships for the city. And the city itself is only a bus ride away.</p>
<p>I know that this is really hard for some people to believe but many very intellectual people really prefer places like Ithaca to NYC & LA…especially to raise a family.</p>
<p>^
No one’s claiming there isn’t an appeal to living in Ithaca and, perhaps, many people would love to live in such a place if they could. But the reality is that it is much harder for a spouse to find a fulfilling and well-paying career if he / she doesn’t work in academia; parents wanting to raise their children in top-flight private schools would not find Ithaca as appealing as greater New York; and it’s a fact that the amenities of a large city provide an appeal for many (not all) that have, historically, made it harder for more rural-based schools to attract and retain talented faculty.</p>
<p>I specified that we now live in an era of globalization and as the world is becoming more connected, cities such as NY, DC, and LA are the international meeting points of ideas, cultures, religions, arts, media, and business. They’re also where one gets exposed to challenges such as continued economic and racial inequalities, unemployment, poverty, environmental pollution, etc… Part of education involves getting a sense of the pulse and shifting tides of the world you are about to enter. There’s something to be said for learning via experience and direct interaction versus sifting through textbooks within the confines of an ivory tower.</p>
<p>My son is starting engineering at Cornell and completely LOVES everything about it…</p>
<p>When we were at accepted students’ weekend, a professor was telling engineers that it was difficult to take a semester abroad because of engineering curriculums…he then said that Cornell had brought the world to its students - which it has with students from every state and 120 countries - so they don’t need to go away to get global experiences. “ivory tower”??? The students here are definitely not isolated from the world.</p>
<p>My D, a recent (year ago) grad of Cornell, now lives in Manhattan and has a job she loves. While at Cornell, she had two summer internships in NYC and another in Geneva, Switzerland during her semester abroad. But I do not think she would give up one second of her time in Ithaca.</p>
<p>She had the best of both worlds. A wonderful collegiate experience and city opportunities. That’s Cornell.</p>
<p>As I said in my previous post, Cornell will always be high in prestige, especially in the fields of engineering and the sciences. I was just talking about how its location may be seen as a disadvantage relative to other elite schools that may otherwise be in an upward trajectory in terms of “prestige” level by virtue of their location and involvement in the life of the city and its networks–especially by students interested in pursuits other than lab work and scientific research. That being said, every student is unique and some people may end up being happier and thrive better in a place like Ithaca for 4 years before heading out to the “real world.” And yes of course opportunities for summer internships and study abroad abound.</p>
<p>I think it will drop because most the smartest and brightest are going to HYPSMC, etc… (C does not standfor cornell). </p>
<p>Look at past USAMO winners and where they went to colleges to get a predictor for future alums.</p>