<p>Truazn misrepresents the ED applications. He/she routinely overstates Columbia's academic standings. Columbia itself has historically misrepresented their applicant and admit data (e.g., publicly stating the admit rate for their more selective lib arts unit and excluding their engineering school BUT using the school-wide SAT average since the engineers have higher scores). </p>
<p>Either Columbia or BusinessWeek falsely stated CU's endowment and fund raising totals in the recent article re Ivy Plus schools. </p>
<p>Just pathetic. It aint enough the you guys wallow in yesterday's glories (yesterday being the 1950s and 1960s), but you have to fabricate the present. No wonder you spend so much time in the Penn boards trying to make yourselves feel better about your alma mater.</p>
<p>"btw. Columbia's ED apps were up to 2500 this year, +25%. How about Penn?"
Even though Penn's apps didn't increase, they recieved 3,929 applications--FAR higher than number Columbia recieved.
And Columbia's ED apps were NOT up 25% it was only a marginal increase on last year.</p>
<p>"Although to be fair Penn's yield is inflated given the number taken ED (almost 50% of the class)."</p>
<p>Penn's overall yield is 66% because of ED, and it admits 48% of the class that way. But Columbia admits 45% of its class ED. Yale was 47%. Cornell, Brown and Princeton are all >37% of their respective classes (although Princeton has stopped ED for this year). </p>
<p>More telling are the regular decision yields, which obviously exclude ED/SCEA type games. As best as I can tell, the RD yields are:</p>
<p>Harvard - ~75%
Yale - ~65%
Stanford - ~58%
MIT - ~55%
Princeton - ~52%
Penn - ~52%
Brown - ~48%
Columbia - ~45%
Cornell - ~42%
Dartmouth - ~40%
Duke - 38-40%</p>
<p>I find myself largely in agreement with red&blue</p>
<p>But I have immense respect for Columbia and will not denigrate it.</p>
<p>Columbia may no longer be the clear immediate runner-up to HYP as it was up in the first half of the 20th century, but that is simply the relative rise of other schools, not the "decline" of Columbia.</p>
<p>Columbia and Penn are true peer research universities--clearly the best of the non-HYP ivies, and they should be proud of that.</p>
<p>Columbia and Penn really are peers in the truest sense of the word. You can't go wrong choosing between the two - it's like trying to choose between MexiCali and Hemo's. Delicious either way.</p>
<p>I thought it was Taco Pal that did that. Then again, I could be totally wrong - food carts to me don't have a name, they have a location and something I either like or don't like. Deciding where to eat is a function of distance, cash in wallet, and line length.</p>
<p>interesting bit of food cart trivia for everyone who's been around Penn for less than about 5 years. The sandwich cart near the 37th street trolley stop is the original greek lady food truck (yes, greek lady was a food truck once upon a time). You can actually still see the greek lady logo on the white plastic thing that hangs off the cart and on the top of the menu; the lettering has been pulled off but you can still see the outline.</p>
<p>None of these other schools have an undergraduate B-school, except MIT. If you factor out Wharton and especially the joint programs (which have yields in the 80s) then Penn does not look as good. Comparing liberal arts to liberal arts, College to the equivalents, Penn is not licking at the heels of HYPMS and ahead of all the other Ivies as it otherwise appears. I think this is what creates a lot of the bitterness and envy we see from the other "low Ivies" and their trolls - Penn is not way ahead of them on a pure liberal arts basis but when you look at the aggregate ratings, it appears that it is. This is the reason why Penn does not break down the admissions data by school. Of course, as pointed out above, other schools mess around with their data too. </p>
<p>In the end, this is all nonsense and bragging rights, because all the Ivies and Ivy-likes are at the top of American education (and are among the top universities on the whole planet), so it's an honor to get into any one of them. </p>
<p>That being said, I wouldn't say that it's a tossup between Penn and Columbia, not because the academic quality is different or better at one or the other, but the feel of the campus and the social life is very different. As usual, the more important issue is not that of rank but of attending the school that is the best fit for you.</p>
<p>while I agree with the concluding points, I have to correct your initial assertions. You've made these points on this site before and they've never made sense. Wharton + all the Wharton affiliated joint programs account for 20-22% of the total undergrad enrollment at Penn. That small percentage isn't driving the overall school's performance. Nursing has 70%+ yields too, but Nursing is 5ish% of undergrad. The College is 60% of total and (sheer size will tell you) is the main factor in any demographic calculation. Sorry pal, but numbers are numbers.</p>
<p>Question for you though - does MIT, Stanford or Cornell break out their per school data? Will Harvard do that now that it has a separate engineering school? </p>
<p>Re academic quality, Columbia and Penn are roughly equal in the humanities and sciences. These two are marginally above Cornell (which is awesome in its own right). All three are above Brown and Dartmouth academically - though those two colleges may provide a better overall ugrad education due to their ugrad focus and total resources avail to the undergrads.</p>
<p>Anyway, please stop the "it only because of Wharton" dribble. Common sense and a cursory review of data doesn't support that conclusion.</p>
<p>Lol. Columbia is still considered the best ivy after HYP partly because of its reputation's?</p>
<p>Columbia may no longer be the clear immediate runner-up to HYP as it was up in the first half of the 20th century, but that is simply the relative rise of other schools, not the "decline" of Columbia.</p>
<p>Columbia was considered better than Yale and Princeton in the first half of the century. Up until the 1960's Columbia and Harvard were considered America's 2 best universities. Columbia was richer than Harvard in these days.</p>
<p>In the public's eye's Columbia>Penn.</p>
<p>Go into a bar and say you go to Columbia you'll be respected. Go into a bar and say you go to penn, people will go tell you to park their cars.</p>
If you're talking about the uninformed public, perhaps. Among those who know about rankings of business schools, medical schools, law schools, and graduate programs; research funding levels; extent of interdisciplinary offerings; etc., probably not. Also, US News detractors notwithstanding, the longer Penn stays in the top 4-7 of the US News rankings (where it's been for the past 11 years), the more the public will accord it that level of prestige.</p>
<p>Penn is fighting old, well-entrenched perceptions of relative prestige, which are hard to overcome. However, with time, they can be, and Penn's upward trajectory in this regard is indisputable.</p>
<p>R&B - I agree that due to Wharton's small size its ability to drive the overall average is limited, but the impact is real. For example, if you look at acceptance rate, without Wharton's 9 or 10% accept rate, the College accept rate is more like 18 or 20% rather than the 16% for the whole undergrad body. Now that doesn't seem like much but in the bragging rights race, it is significant. Again I'm not saying that Penn without Wharton is chopped liver but it's not quite the school it appears to be when you lump Wharton in. OTOH, as you say, taking Nursing out would help, but only slightly because it is even smaller than Wharton.</p>
<p>Percy, both SEAS and Nursing have significantly higher acceptance rates than the overall acceptance rate of 16%--together it's certainly more than 6-7 points above 16% (i.e., it's higher than 22-23%). Also, together those 2 schools accept more total applicants than does Wharton. Accordingly, the College's acceptance rate probably comes in fairly close to the overall 16% acceptance rate (maybe a bit higher or lower), with Wharton's rate being 9-10% and the combined Nursing+SEAS rate being somewhere in the 20-30% range, but more heavily weighted than Wharton because of the larger number of acceptances.</p>
<p>
[quote]
For example, if you look at acceptance rate, without Wharton's 9 or 10% accept rate, the College accept rate is more like 18 or 20% rather than the 16%
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Incorrect. Wharton is around 11% and SAS is around 15%. It's the engineering school that skews the acceptance rate up.</p>
<p>Note to wharton: you are not all that and a bag of potato chips</p>
<p>45% and Bagels seem to have slightly different stats - not surprising given how shy they are in giving these #'s out. Where do each of your get your #'s from and can we see a table of # applied (ED/RD) for each school and # accepted according to your version. I once tried to back into this # based upon the data released by the admissions office and separately by Wharton (e.g. in the Business Week survey) and for the life of me I couldn't make the #'s come out. Part of it I think is that Wharton and the admissions office count joint program apps differently. </p>
<p>But, on reflection I'm inclined to buy into 45%'s version - that SEAS and Nurs. drag the average down more than Wharton boosts it up, so that the Col. is about the same as the overall avg. In a way I'm surprised that they haven't shut these progs. down - SEAS is not a top rated program in the Engineering field and does not help Penn's reputation at all. Nursing they probably like because it gives them a supply of cheap labor at the hospital, but they did not hesitate to shut SAMP down because again it was not a net positive to the U's Ivy reputation. It's one thing to call Wharton a "trade school", it's another to actually HAVE a trade school.</p>
<p>not every action the university takes is or should be about boosting it's reputation, god forbid they actually educate some people along the way. SEAS is quite respectably rated, just because they dare to accept one in five applicants hardly diminishes the program, and nursing occupies the highest station in its particular field. percy, I am utterly shocked how you've been at Penn for almost an entire semester and yet still fail to realize just how small a piece wharton is in the overall scheme of the university. It is not a major source of research in the way many other departments are, only takes up two buildings on campus, and really only serves to elevate the university through networking and reputation. The program is small enough relative to the rest of the university that it has most likely zero impact on the overall numbers (as an aside, I find it very odd that people spend so much time here quibbling over these odd percentage points, when Penn releases no official numbers for individual schools and so all that is really ever made is a guesstimate).</p>
<p>It's always possible to have a statistical outlier - as the state law school in a populous state, Rutgers attracts a lot of applicants seeking low tuition. This doesn't mean that rankings like admit rate have no meaning at all - that # by itself doesn't prove much but as part of an overall picture it tells you something. Why did you have to look at law schools - the undergrad admit rates don't have outliers like this?</p>
<p>Aside from "networking and reputation" , Wharton is also a major source of donations - not that many Nursing grads are in a position to give millions later.</p>
<p>Look - I didn't kill SAMP - the Trustees did and it was indicative of their way of thinking, not mine. That same mentality could kill Nursing or SEAS. If Penn didn't already have a Nursing school do you think they would start one now and would you support that?</p>