penn is my first choice and dream school but i would also love to go to cornell
cornell has a higher acceptance rate compared to penn
in terms of academics and programs am attracted to both unis
can someone tell me about the differences in terms of
environment/location/weather
how competitive each one is
better aid package?
Penn is an urban campus- if world class food, arts, music, shopping attract you along with the bustle and grit of a city you will feel right at home. It has easy access to NYC and Washington for the trifecta. While the campus is in Philadelphia, it sits across the river in the West Philly section and is slightly isolated in its own little bubble with a storybook like campus. West Philly is a lower income section of the city but has a strong neighborhood community and Penn tries to reach out and become a vital part in helping that community lots of ways to volunteer. The weather in Philly is more moderate and less snowy than Ithaca’s climate. Ithaca is snowy and freezing in the winter - but has skiing nearby.
Cornell is located far from other major cites in upstate NY in a small city (top rated college town really) and is home to two big universities -so it has arts too through those schools but its not a real urban experience. It is known for its “gorgeous” scenery - so called bc there are several gorges, waterfalls, and green hills nearby. If you are an outdoorsy type it would be ideal probably for you. Philly also has some beautiful outdoor space along the Schuylkill river trail and parks so all is not lost if you are an outdoor lover and go to Penn…
Both are extremely competitive to get in (although Cornell is known as the easiest Ivy to get in). Once you are in though Penn is generally known to have a less competitive culture between students than Cornell. Cornell students are known to be cut throat with each other. A family friend’s son just graduated and told stories of friends trying to sabotage each other with homework,tests, and papers. He said in hindsight he wished he had attended another school due to the enormous workload and cut throat competition. I have never heard that about Penn. While Penn is known to be challenging it is also known as the social ivy. Work hard Play hard.
For financial aid - it really depends on your own circumstances so run the net price calculators with real figures and you should get an idea.
On the whole, Cornell has fewer resources in total and per student than Penn. Penn has a bigger endowment and smaller undergraduate student body, in general financial aid tends to be more generous at Penn.
I think ED should be reserved for one s dream school so I suggest applying ED to Penn. Penn ED has a significantly higher acceptance rate than RD (RD nowadays is a total crapshoot), so it will be your best chance of getting into Penn.
As for your other questions, Philly weather is definitely better than Upstate NY weather. Also location is far better imo. At Penn you are located in a big city with great offerings for everything, but it is not an overwhelming city (think NYC or LA). Also Penn is situated pretty centrally but not exactly in the center of Philly, i.e. it has its own distinct campus and campus atmosphere feel, while at the same time being minutes away from center city. Penn is competitive but also collaborative. People are immensely driven and hustle all the time for academics, extracurriculars, professional opportunities, internships etc. However you do see a lot of collaboration inside the classroom and outside too and there is no really any sabotaging going on between the students. Cornell is rumored to be very cutthroat and also kind of overwhelming given the vast size of its undergrad student body, but these could be just misconceptions and rumors that outsiders have (i don’t claim to know much about Cornell).
Different schools, very different environments. In general I"m an advocate of only applying ED if a school is a student’s absolute top choice rather than as a “play” to try to gain admissions. If you apply ED to Cornell and get in you might always wonder “what if I applied to Penn?”
If UPenn is your top choice, and you’re within statistical range for the school, you should ED to Penn. This is exactly what ED is for - it’s best for competitive candidates who want to show their interest in a particular school. Further, as Penn now practices restrictive ED (you can’t EA to any other private), the pool may be a little smaller, and applying ED will “mean” more - because the admissions office knows their is no chance your sights are also set on some other top private school.
Admissions counsel aside, Cornell is a bit of an under-appreciated school (similar to what Penn used to be around 15 years ago, and probably still continues to be today, in some circles). FWIW, Cornell still has one of the highest academic peer scores in US News (outside of the “Big 5” of Harvard et. al.) - I believe it’s been around 4.6/5 - tied with Chicago, Columbia, Hopkins, and Cal Tech - for some time. Take that with a grain of salt but, for a long time, Cornell was seen as a rigorous, top-notch academic institution.
(Full scores here: http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/college-rankings-blog/2013/02/28/which-universities-are-ranked-highest-by-college-officials)
All this to say I’m not sure why Cornell is so readily passed over. It does indeed have a rep for having a fairly intense academic atmosphere, but no more so than Chicago, MIT, Hopkins, etc. It also has broad, strong brand recognition, probably considerably more than Penn. (Note, Penn may have marginally better outcomes in some fields where it is more entrenched - like finance/consulting, but there seems to be more broad awareness about the Cornell brand). So, I’m always confused when students readily avoid Ithaca in favor of Hanover, or Providence, or Durham. (The Cornell v. Penn choice comes up less often, I imagine - the schools are in very different locations and have very different feels.)
@Cue7 I dont agree that there is more broad awareness of the Cornell vs the Penn brand, I have never heard that before from anyone. Penn does not just have marginally better outcomes in some fields. Overall its graduate programs are stronger than Cornell’s, has more financial resources and all this does trickle down to undergrad. For example at Penn one can easily conduct research at one of the very top hospitals and medical schools in the country and the world. Cornell does not offer this option given that its med school and hospital is in New York. At Penn an undergrad can take as many courses as they want at one of the top business schools in the country sometimes alongside MBA students, even if that student is not a wharton undergrad. A person can take law school classes at a top 10 law school or even sub matriculate into the JD program as an undergrad. There is a huge number of superstar professors in a variety of different fields at Penn who also get to teach undergrads. C
Peer scores are highly subjective and a 0.01/0.02 difference between schools does not have a practically meaningful difference. Of course Cornell is an amazing school, and of course places like Penn or Chicago are not actually much more prestigious in any meaningful sense. But the stronger overall grad schools and the effect this has on undergrad departmental quality and also the smaller student body and more resources in undergrad, give them an edge over Cornell. The Cornell vs Penn choice actually does come up quite often, (the schools are actually very similar in many ways: both have greek life, both have a preprofessional culture, both have intense and competitive atmospheres etc) and the choice is overwhelmingly Penn.
All that said if Cornell is the first choice for someone, of course it makes sense to turn down Penn, Columbia, Chicago, even HYPSM for it. The school doesnt make the student and at Cornell the education is by no means at all inferior to the aforementioned schools. It will be up to the student to take advantage of the resources available. However for some well established reasons most people when faced with the choice have chosen the other over Cornell.
Lastly, Penn was not underrated until 17-18 years ago. There was good reason it was not considered as highly as today. It was actually lacking in certain areas, was not taking advantage of its resources correctly was not organized properly. Former president Judith Rodin saw that during her tenure all these things were addressed. As a result Penn’s quality improved tremendously, it started becoming more savvy about marketing and the whole admissions game (much like Chicago in this respect) and as a result rose tremendously.
Now, keep in mind, this doesn’t mean much in terms of outcomes - schools like Williams and Haverford and Wash U probably don’t have broad brand recognition, but they’re all wonderful places. Cornell, to me at least, felt like a school that was somewhat of a known commodity broadly - in a way that Penn wasn’t, at least in my experience being an alum. Again, I don’t care about this, but I never understood how a school like Cornell, which, to me, had a lot of public cachet, then underperformed when it comes to admissions.
Re the peer scores, my main point is that there is some “stickiness” to these scores, and Cornell generally outperforms Duke, Penn, Brown, Northwestern, etc. My sense is, however, that Cornell does NOT fare well in admissions against any of these schools. It’s as well regarded as any of them (if not better), but there’s a big gap in cross admit data. Further, it’s unfortunate for cornell because this score is the hardest to change, and there’s now a very strong correlation between this score and the rank of a school.
(A quick side bar - as Johns Hopkins has started to play the rankings game, and it enjoys a strong peer score, it’s starting to manipulate factors like admit rate and incoming student strength to begin its march into the top ten. This, by the way, puts Duke and Penn - the two top 10 schools with the weakest peer scores - at risk of dropping out of the top ten. A few years back, two other schools with the strongest peer scores - Chicago and Columbia - did the same thing, and this all has the net effect of punishing the schools without the best peer scores. Because of this, we’ve seen Duke and Penn essentially flip places with Columbia and Chicago, and it looks like Hopkins is pressing forward here too. Cornell can’t, because, based on its size and land grant status, many of its programs are fixed - it has less flexibility than some of its smaller peers.)
Finally, you mentioned that Penn’s stronger grad schools, smaller student body, etc. give it an edge over Cornell. This may be the case, but I’m not sure if those factors are the most salient when determining strength of the undergraduate experience. Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, Hopkins, etc. all lack top flight professional schools (in Law, business) or top grad programs in some areas, for example, but they all handily win over cross-admits. Moreover, the benefits of a large school - the ability to tailor the experience more, avoid a homogenous school culture, etc. are significant. Being larger is one of Penn’s strengths actually - and keep in mind that Penn has more students total than Cornell.
To sum, I have no real reason to back Cornell, but it just seems under-appreciated to me. It seems like just as good an option as Dartmouth, Brown, Duke, Penn, Northwestern (and probably Columbia and Chicago too) but my sense is it falls far short of these other peers in the college admissions game.
On that note, I’m surprised to hear that it has lots of competition with Penn - the locations seem so different. I thought Cornell would have more overlap with top land-grant schools (like U. of Michigan), and possibly research Us in more isolated areas (like Duke, Wash U, or possibly Northwestern, even though NU is close to Chicago).
@Cue7 A person who knows what Cornell, Chicago, Duke, Borwn or Dartmouth are, does not confuse Penn with Penn State. People who are college football fans and are not really familiar with elite schools (apart from the obvious ones Harvard, Stanford, MIT etc) probably will not know Penn but chances are they won’t know any of the other schools either.
Princeton might not have professional schools like Medicine, Law, Business, but it does have some of the best graduate programs in the world. All the schools you mention win cross admits in my opinion because people weigh in both the strength of graduate programs and the undergrad teaching quality, size of undergrad population, distribution of resources. I do think strength of graduate programs trickles down to undergrad because it affects to a great degree departmental quality and research opportunities. As the paradigm shifts away from plain liberal arts to a combination of liberal arts and pre professionalism, graduate program quality becomes more and more relevant, especially at a place like Penn that is small enough for professors to have meaningful interactions with students. Penn is large enough to offer a diverse experience but not too large to feel too overwhelming and for resources to be diluted across a vast undergraduate student body.
Also I don’t think Columbia or Chicago and especially Chicago are in some way above Penn or even Duke, just because in the last few years they have been ranking higher than Penn. (For many years before than Penn was higher). The cross-admit split, overall and RD yield rate, number of major scholarships (Rhodes, Marshall etc) , career, grad school outcomes, relative departmental qualities as a whole etc, do not support this.
On the other hand I think there is a slight difference between Columbia, Penn, Chicago and also Duke vs Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, NW.
Btw yeah Cornell and Penn are definitely similar not in term of location of course, but in man y ways in terms of culture and atmosphere. Probably the most similar ivy to Penn is Cornell.