<p>
I agree with monydad. Dartmouth is a very, very good school, but it is absurd to say that it offers more breadth in liberal arts than Cornell. Certainly in my field (Classics), Dartmouth is good but inferior to Cornell.</p>
<p>I was speaking under the assumption that if he chose Cornell, he would go to the College of Engineering. I do acknowledge the fact that Cornell has a larger course range; however, is a student from the CoE able to have as much access to it? If the OP is not going to CAS, then ignore my post.</p>
<p>EDIT: I just realized I didn’t specify in my previous post, so I apologize.</p>
<p>Gah, I meant “If the OP is not going to CoE, then ignore my post.” To put my previous words in better clarity: Would a person in the Cornell College of Engineering be able to explore Cornell’s liberal arts courses as much a Dartmouth student would? Thanks monydad for calling me out on my mistake btw!</p>
<p>If you want good science and engineering programs, Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech are all good schools. Of course, they are different from Cornell and Dartmouth in other aspects.</p>
<p>Yes, Cornell’s physical sciences and engineering are literally among the finest in the world. But this is really only important at the graduate level. Do you truly plan on exhausting the course offerings at Dartmouth? Do you think that you won’t be sufficiently challenged?</p>
<p>Unless you don’t plan on grad school (wherein Dartmouth would be your terminal science degree), or you think that you can actually contribute to the cutting edge research that Cornell implements (to which you may, but this seems unlikely), then the quality of departments isn’t that important. I assure you that Dartmouth’s are very good as well - perhaps not of the same highest caliber, but certainly enough to educate you well for your bachelor’s degree.</p>
<p>Conclusion: make the choice based on fit.</p>
<p>Re: #22: a full engineering curriculum is very demanding, to the point where many in the industry want it to be a 5 year program instead of four years. Like most programs, Cornell’s engineering college requires sufficient training in engineering. Engineers also have electives they can take outside of engineering, and Cornell is relatively liberal with electives IIRC, and students can take anything the university offers. Not just in Arts & sciences, but at the other undergraduate colleges as well. Many engineering students choose Cornell, vs. engineering programs elsewhere precisely because of this access to studies in other areas.</p>
<p>There are some handful of “engineering” programs that do not require the more universally standard engineering curriculum, and in that case students may well be able to take more extensive offerings in liberal arts than they would as engineering students at Cornell. However, there is a tradeoff if they exercise such a path, in that they will then have less than the conventionally expected degree of training in engineering. In an environment where employers are already complaining about not enough training as is. </p>
<p>One can obviously compensate for this by going to grad school, but their path leading to grad school may be less informed then if they’d taken the more customary number of courses in the field up to that point. And grad school may be more necessary, due to relative lack of training, rather than optional.</p>
<p>There are clearly people who prefer a completely comprehensive liberal arts education, and are willing to sacrifice a more conventional breadth and depth of training in engineering to accomplish that.</p>
<p>However many people contemplating engineering would prefer to ensure that they will be optimally trained, and optimally informed, to best accomplish their primary goal, while still being able to access substantial breadth of exposure to other areas along the way. Should an engineering student decide somewhat early on that this path is actually not for them, much of the curriculum the first two years consists of basic science and math courses that are fully transferable to other programs, either at cornell or elsewhere.</p>
<p>I agree with monydad and CayugaRed2005. Cornell has world-class calibre Arts & Science and Engineering programs plus lots more – Hotel, Ag Schools, etc. It is an Ivy League and Big Ten school all rolled into one. That said, I still prefer Dartmouth – it is a smaller school, more concentrated on undergraduates – not better, just different.</p>
<p>I disagree with the comment on athletics. Cornell athletics – not so good.</p>
<p>there are some great posts here, but i think they make a great case for cornell if you are interested in science or engineering</p>
<p>I’m not saying that Cornell is bad, but I don’t think many Dartmouth science people have responded on this thread (and several newly-registered Cornell supporters have).</p>
<p>Is Cornell good at science? Yes, I don’t think anyone would dispute that. Are the offerings wider? Yes, but that comes with costs. </p>
<p>Dartmouth has fewer classes, to be sure, but it comes with a chance for smaller classes and more interactions with professors. You can take an ecological methods class with 8 people, or a topics in engineering class with even fewer. And you don’t really have to compete with many graduate students for attention–the faculty are the ones teaching and directly supervising you in their labs.</p>
<p>There is a lot of flexibility to take science classes at the graduate and undergraduate levels while also taking classes in a wide array of other disciplines. There’s a medical school actually in the same town, allowing opportunities for clinical or translational research. The preparation is outstanding: my friends have gone on to Ph.D. or M.D./Ph.D. programs at Duke, Stanford, Scripps, Harvard, Brown, Vanderbilt, MIT, Emory, UCLA, and Columbia, to name a few. </p>
<p>Not to say that some of this isn’t available at Cornell, or that Cornell doesn’t offer good preparation for graduate study, but I think some of the Cornell supporters are looking at things through some overly red-shaded glasses in proclaiming their school far better than Dartmouth at the undergraduate level.</p>
<p>Look, I’m a high school senior and I got into Cornell, Upenn, and Dartmouth. Honestly Upenn’s atmosphere was dark because of its terrible neighborhood (if anyone has visited they will know what i am talking about). It was between Cornell and Dartmouth because they both had beautiful open campuses. I plan on pursuing degrees and careers in science so I did a lot of research and talked to people at both schools and my cousin who is working on a mechanical engineering doctorate at MIT. Cornell places a lot more people in top science PhD programs and Cornell’s own Phd programs are a lot higher ranked than Dartmouth’s, which means better research, world-renowned faculty, and more recommendations that carry more weight AND Cornell’s endowment is almost double that of Dartmouth’s which shows in Cornell’s state of the art research facilities. The argument about classes that are smaller is totally bogus Cornell has a 9:1 faculty to student ratio. See, the larger endowment allows the school to have more top professors and researchers than Dartmouth so the ratio of faculty to students is not even an issue. What did all of this mean to me? I chose Cornell. Message me if you have any more questions.</p>
<p>Just did a quick glance on Wikipedia:</p>
<p>Cornell:
Endowment: $6.0 Billion
13,000 undergraduate and 6,000 graduate students</p>
<p>Dartmouth: $3.76 billion
4,147 Undergraduates and 1,701 graduate students</p>
<p>Big endowments (Dartmouth and Cornell) may more likely make big spending projects possible.</p>
<p>Higher endowment per student (Dartmouth) would more likely allow students to actually get supported.</p>
<p>
You should know that any endowment figures at the moment are wildly inaccurate. Dartmouth lost a considerable chunk of its endowment and is reducing spending and laying off employees like everyone else.</p>
<p>Including Cornell, which had an even bigger decline than Dartmouth.
[Cornell</a> to Cut Spending After Endowment Falls 27% (Update1) - Bloomberg.com](<a href=“Politics - Bloomberg”>http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=ak2WrtJ6GMB0&refer=us)</p>
<p>If you’re looking to get into the sciences then yes, Cornell is a more respected school.</p>