<p>patlees88: That study you posted is horrible! The sample is from people who go to New England prep schools.. so Cornell would have some bias simply due to location. Look at what schools people are actually choosing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!</p>
<p>I am serious. It seems like everyone at Duke picked it over Cornell!! I am freaking serious, patless88!!!!!!</p>
<p>Or maybe Cornell just rejects/waitlists all the really bright applicants and the 'less qualified ones' pick Cornell due to it 'Ivy status'..
since I dunno.. Duke is way ahead in Cornell in many areas, Duke seems to have a more qualified student body as a whole just when you look at SAT averages.</p>
<p>Do you have the SAT average for CAS & Engineering? Then, I would be convinced. I am sure it is fairly high but I don't think it is at 1450.</p>
<p>Mondo, since you seem very serious, perhaps I could ask you some serious questions. 1) Where in the NY study did you get that the sample is from New England prep schools? From what I can see it says 500 schools across the country. Perhaps patlees88 can post the original article? 2) I'm sure that students attending Duke will have picked it over Cornell, since they turned down all other schools as well in order to attend Duke... What exactly do you mean by you said? 3) You say "Duke is way ahead in Cornell in many areas" could you clarify what you mean by that? 4) Since you're comparing students too, I'm guessing you must have student connections at Cornell. Could you clarify how you arrived at your conclusions?
Sorry if I seem obnoxious... I'm also trying to decide between the two schools and I'm trying to remove some bias.</p>
<p>CollegeHelp: "thethoughtprocess is saying that Duke placement is better on Wall Street, finance, and consulting based on hearsay from former interns. This lacks credibility."</p>
<p>Its not based on hearsay, I interned last summer as a BB SA intern and this upcoming year will be working in consulting.</p>
<p>I-banking and consulting are not huge fields and are not geographically disparate - it wasn't hard for me to realize that half of my class at Duke got internships at elite companies. </p>
<p>I mean, on websites such as WallStreetOasis.com</a> | ...where monkeys come to play there have been lists of undergrads of internship classes posted, all of them with Duke among the top few highest placing schools. If there is any correlation with grad school placement, look at this:</p>
<p>Why would you post a blog that essentially rips the WSJ ranking (which is admittedly very flawed) to shreds? Did you even bother to read the page you posted?</p>
<p>anonymous89: I meant that many people at Duke were accepted at BOTH Duke and Cornell and picked Duke.</p>
<p>Sorry, I realized my post seemed somewhat obnoxious. I mellowed out since I wrote it, lol. It is just I hate it when people say Cornell>Duke or that Cornell is the more prestigious school. It is a false claim. </p>
<p>thethoughtprocess brought up a really good ranking from the WSJ. Duke is way up in the top ten for getting people into top law/medical/business schools. </p>
<p>What ****es me off isn't the fact that I don't think Cornell is a good school. In fact, one argument for Cornell being better and more 'selective' is that I actually got into Duke and didn't get into Cornell. :p.</p>
<p>However, there is no way that one can say that Cornell is better than Duke for employment prospects and that Cornell has a 'smarter student body'. I am not going to say that Duke is better than Cornell (even though Duke places more a higher percentage of people into top grad schools AND Duke pwns Cornell on the SATs (and probably GPA/class rank too..)), I am going to say that both are incredibly good choices.</p>
<p>I'd agree with most claims that Duke is superior in BME, law/med/business programs, since that's what most people seem to say (I haven't done much research on those topics because they don't concern me). Someone already made this point, but I want to reinforce that Cornell is a HUGE school with different specialties that don't require high SAT scores or high class ranks to succeed in their respective careers (Architecture, Hotel, etc.). But then we shouldn't ignore the science/tech side of Cornell, which, as far as I can tell, is far superior to Duke's. Anyone care to challenge that?</p>
<p>
[quote]
Cornell enrolls about 65% of its students in marketable majors like Engineering, Business, Sciences, and Architecture. Duke enrolls only about 33% of its students in these majors. Duke is about 50% English, Philosophy, Psychology, other Social Sciences. These majors are not as marketable.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Marketable to what?</p>
<p>How many other universities in the top 15 have undergraduate architectural programs? Cornell, MIT</p>
<p>How many other universities in the top 15 have undergraduate business programs? UPenn, MIT and Cornell</p>
<p>Are you claiming that every other top school without these programs places poorly in graduate placement and recruitment?</p>
<p>Roughly a 1/4 of the school entering finance after graduation is pretty good for a school "lacking practical majors" just like most of the other top schools</p>
<p>Investment banking and consulting, in particular, do not care what you major in coming from a target so that argument is irrelevant.</p>
Yes, I would like to challenge that assertion. Cornell is a MUCH BIGGER school and so even if it has slightly more resources in engineering to offer its students at the undergraduate level, its size negates that advantage. Duke offers a smaller and more tight-knit engineering community in which the school's advising focuses more attention on its undergrads. The employment prospects post-graduation from Duke and Cornell are nearly identical. You choose which school to attend based on fit.</p>
<p>Duke boasts a better social, better athletic programs, more school spirit, warmer weather and happier students than Cornell.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I'd agree with most claims that Duke is superior in BME, law/med/business programs
[/quote]
</p>
<p>No, Duke is superior in BME and that's it. There are no such thing as law/med/business "programs" because getting into professional schools doesn't require much education. There's no required major. Medicine requires 3-4 intro courses and that's it. Much of getting into law/med/business schools is dependent on the individual. It's not surprising that more selective schools have better placement rates. It doesn't mean that a Duke-quality student would disadvantage himself by going to Cornell.</p>
<p>In fields where the quailty of programs actually counts (architecture, engineering, sciences, etc.) that's where Cornell shines. I'm still wondering why this is still a debate when the two engineering programs are light-years apart.</p>
<p>So Duke has smaller classes, but can it match co-op opportunities, research opportunities, 5th year master's degree, and the opportunity to go for a Ph.D after four years of undergraduate studies + research? I plan on going for higher degrees.</p>
<p>Engineers learn the same stuff in undergrad wherever they go. Students in Cornell and Duke use the same text books and same curriculums.</p>
<p>Duke is in RTP, one of the coolest places for engineers, and most people I know are working for like Cisco or Bioscience firms or something.</p>
<p>I actually don't know anything about engineering beyond that at undergrad you'd learn the same stuff at Duke and Cornell, but Duke provides better opportunities to the engineers it does have (not surprising, the Duke engineering class is much smaller than Cornell's.) This means more internships in the local area, more money for research, and so on.</p>
<p>Seriously, a good internship is more important than what you study.</p>
<p>Someone on another thread posted a good comparison of Duke and Cornell's engineering programs. I'll leave it at that.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Workload probably isn't the thing to compare the two schools. The differences between Cornell and Duke Engineering lie in the:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Number of departments:
Cornell: 13 engineering majors, 21 engineering minors
Duke: 4 engineering departments</p></li>
<li><p>Industry connections:
Cornell: Co-Op program. Two TECHNICAL career fairs with over 200 companies each time. At least 2 company information sessions a week during the fall. Outstanding ENGINEERING career services office
Duke: No co-op program. I don't know about the other stuff, but my sense was that Duke does not provide engineering specific offices for career services, etc.</p></li>
<li><p>Research:
Cornell: #1 Nanotechnology center in the country (probably in the world). Millions and millions pouring into engineering for research. Expanding: new CS building, etc. Lots of research in all of the engineering departments
Duke: $$ is all in biomedical research. 50% of the engineering class is BME</p></li>
</ol>
<p>If you want to be a biomedical engineer and continue on to med school...go to Duke. if you want to BE an engineer come to Cornell!
<p>My argument is that you learn the same stuff in engineering.</p>
<p>Major companies that recruit engineers that I know personally at Duke include: all investment banks, Cisco, Microsoft, Google, and a bunch of other companies I've never heard of. I'm sure recruitment at Duke is just as good as Cornell.</p>
<p>In terms of getting into grad school, I bet Cornell is better though because the department's have better professors and subsequently students MIGHT have access to more research. At the same time, Cornell has 2X the number of engineering students Duke does.</p>
<p>To my mind, these comparison discussions reflect a poor understanding of institutions and statistics. First off, both of these places have many, many students and professors who are very, very smart. They have thoughtful administrators. No undergraduate or graduate student or professor or administrator understands the range of available opportunities. There are probably some differences, but the vast majority of variables are too close to call. The same holds for the rest of the top couple dozen colleges. 95% of your college experience is up to you, not the college, and I don't believe that anyone on this thread is going to find themselves underwhelmed by either place.</p>