<p>Columbia is now scraping up towards the very most selective colleges in the country, which is different from when I attended college. That’s an element people may variously evaluate, value and weigh.</p>
<p>In terms of substance though:</p>
<p>My daughter lived her early life in Manhattan, moved out and lived in suburbs, eventually Westchester. She was very familiar with the city before she attended college. She attended Barnard, found she didn’t like it there so much, and transferred to Cornell and loves it there. </p>
<p>Socially, I would say her feelings about life as a student there are partially captured by the posters on this thread <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/columbia-university/1041703-4-years-later-reflections-columbia-college-senior.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/columbia-university/1041703-4-years-later-reflections-columbia-college-senior.html</a> . Others feel otherwise though, as the thread indicates, there is not necessarily a universal experience.</p>
<p>As she perceived it, Columbia life is a bit towards living life in the city, by comparison with a traditional campus experience. This is a huge tipping point for those who haven’t already done that and want it, but was less impressive for her, as she’d already “been there, done that”. She found the connection to the school and the campus is reduced vs. the traditional college experience. Like people living in the city generally, the social scene can be relatively fragmented and incohesive there. They have no real, equally viable analog to the collegetown house parties one finds at Cornell, and the mindset of a larger proportion was not to stay around campus. So she found people were too frequently mindlessly barhopping to the village in small groups, where one is not necessarily surrounded always by fellow students. And which costs money, and was not too much fun after a very short while.</p>
<p>A big exception to this seems to be if you are a fraternity type,and are selected to join a fraternity, you may well have the social issue pretty much taken care of by that scene. My nephew was in a frat at Columbia and it was the center of his social life there. he loved it. There is another CC poster whose son is likewise in a frat, and loves it; doesn’t even understand what some other people are complaining about.</p>
<p>But my daughter wasn’t into frats, and neither were some of the people who posted on that thread. She much prefers the Collegetown scene, house parties etc, to anything that she found when she lived in Morningside Heights.</p>
<p>My daughter also found Manhattan life to be ridiculously expensive as a poor college student, vs. life in Ithaca. Others on CC claim otherwise, but that was definitely how she perceived it.</p>
<p>A final observation on social aspects, with Barnard thrown in the Columbia undergrad community is somewhat female-heavy.</p>
<p>Academically, Cornell has a humongous breath and depth of course offerings, by virtue of its seven undergraduate colleges. Of course Columbia has quite a lot as well. There is an infrequent CC poster who transferred to Cornell from Columbia, and he says Columbia had smaller classes, that’s quite possibly the case. And he didn’t like walking around a spread-out campus. However, my daughter’s particular Columbia classes were not all that small. She had good and bad teachers at both, and when I asked her recently she said, upon reflection, that the quality of the professor was more important than the size of the class. Her absolute favorite college classes so far were two at Cornell, the third was one at Columbia.</p>
<p>As for the afterlife: both universities are recruited by good firms, but I can’t guarantee that access to opportunites afterwards are absolutely identical (nor can anyone else). Columbia people seem happy with their career center for wall street recruiting (certainly worked out for my nephew), however there have been CC posts to the effect that it is somewhat limited for things more off their conventional track.</p>
<p>D2 loves the campus feel at Cornell, the different, lower-key life in Ithaca, the beautiful scenery, the friends she’s made in Ithaca, her house in collegetown which has almost become her version of a de facto frat, the diversity of courses and types of people there, couldn’t be happier with the change. She actually does more in Ithaca than she did in Manhattan, because she can afford it. I lent her a car, she drives all around, which is very helpful to expand her range, though not necessary. She also finds that the people are more diverse “types”, with a greater proportion of not-rich, “down-to earth” people (thanks to the contract colleges IMO) that she just likes better. She didn’t know it would be this way for sure, but turns out she loves the different environment in Ithaca. I think she’s going to stay there again this summer.</p>
<p>YMMV.</p>