Graduate emphasis at Columbia

<p>Is this rumor true?
I heard that Columbia emphasizes graduate school much more than undergraduate, similar to the administration at Harvard.</p>

<p>The college is actually a pretty small student body at about 4,000 students. Smaller than princeton, yale, harvard, brown. . . with a student:faculty ratio that ties Yale at 6:1, just above Princeton at 5:1, and under Harvard at 8:1 and Brown at 9:1. . . so it would seem that the undergrads in the college, actually, are well taken care of.</p>

<p>Sorry my friends, it is true. MAny of the professors yank their time for the Grad students instead of the undergrads. I should know, I graduated TC / Columbia and even Masters students felt that they were playing second best to the Doctoral candidates. The feeling that I get from much of the student body seems to be in agreement with this. When I was undergrad at Yale, I too, felt that I was playing second fiddle to the graduates. It happens all over, not just at Columbia.</p>

<p>I would agree that it's a general trend of college instruction. If a school has a graduate program in a given subject, of course the professors are going to be interested in the most advanced pupils. However, I haven't heard of a single school where you can't meet with a professor during office hours. If you want attention, you might have to ask for it a little more forcefully, but it's obtainable at any level.</p>