<p>One more thing – Fraternities and sororities are fairly important at Penn. Lots of students join, and they are pretty significant for on-campus social life. Both Brown and Columbia have fraternities and sororities, but they are far less important – barely more than 10% of students join at Brown, and more like 7% at Columbia (where of course the fraternities can’t afford houses anyway). At Penn it’s about 1/3 of students.</p>
<p>Sports are also far more important at Penn. People actually go out to watch their teams play, and cheer and everything. That’s not a big feature of life at Columbia or Brown.</p>
<p>I would just add to the quite comprehensive and insightful posts of JHS that more than Columbia–and certainly Brown–Penn really pushes the availability to all undergrads of not only courses in the other undergrad schools, but also the professional and grad schools. Penn really encourages undergrads to take courses in the Annenberg School for Communication, the Law School (the Law School actually advertises its courses to undergrads in the Daily Pennsylvanian), the School of Design, Graduate School of Education, School of Social Policy and Practice, etc. My impression is that the courses in these grad and professional schools are significantly more available to undergrads at Penn than comparable courses would be to undergrads at, say, Columbia. Interdisciplinary and interschool education is a major hallmark of Penn, and has been for decades, if not centuries. :)</p>
<p>On the other hand, as gugupo so insightfully points out, the overall admit rate at Columbia is lower than that at Penn, so it MUST be a better school. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Admit rates only mean something to prestige whores. That being said, of course Penn will have a higher admit rate simply because it is a larger school.</p>
<p>While not all prospective students apply to each and every Ivy League school, there is most probably a significant percentage of cross applicants. Because of Penn’s size, it is able to admit more of them than most of its peer institutions.</p>
<p>Only simple minded people will choose to attend their college based upon the lowest admission rate. Plenty of Penn students are accepted to other prestigious schools, but choose Penn for a number of reasons. Likewise, plenty of other students choose other schools over Penn for their own good reasons.</p>
<p>Please tell all of us why a ■■■■■ like you lurks on the Penn forum. Your immaturity shows that you are not the 40 year old shown in your profile. I myself am a former Penn graduate student with a son entering the Vagelos Scholars Program this fall. What is your excuse for being here? Plenty of us would like to know why you ONLY post on the Penn forum. Your thinly veiled anger for the school can only be the result of you being rejected by Penn. If such an “easy school to get into like Penn” (which it is not) rejected you, then where does that put you on the totem pole?</p>
<p>I think Columbia graduates are far more successful and famous than Penn,& Brown graduates.
e.g.) Barak Obama, Warren Buffet, Morgan Stanley CEO James P. Gorman, Citi Bank CEO
Vikram Pandit, US attorney general Eric Holder, US Supreme Court justice etc.
Columbia is also the school with highest number Nobel laureates in the world.</p>
<p>Selectivity has nothing to do with acceptance rate. Caltech, the most selective school in the country, has an acceptance rate higher than every Ivy League school except for Cornell.</p>
<p>The facts: Penn, Columbia, Brown and Dartmouth have almost identical SAT averages and HS ranking of incoming freshman. They all have the same average LSAT score. They share similar rankings. They have essentially equal cross-admit data (especially if you look at recent studies, like my chances . net, rather than the decade-old revealed preference paper). The conventional wisdom, until the late 1990s, favored Brown - that trend has definitely shifted. I honestly didn’t realize Brown was even on par until I arrived at college.</p>
<p>Arranging the middle 4 ivies is essentially a fruitless ****ing contest - so different are they structurally and culturally - but in terms of selectivity they are truly equal.</p>
<p>As for billkamix: that’s idiotic. What about Ezra Pound, Noam Chomsky, Loren Eiseley, Hilary Putnam, Robert Solomon, Arlen Spector… the list is just as varied and amazing. A lot of it is on wikipedia, if you’d like to enlighten yourself.</p>
<p>Specifically regarding Nobel prize affiliates: Columbia had an intensely productive period of scientific research in the middle of the century that almost no other university matched. In the last decade, however, Penn has easily caught up; 10 Nobel affiliates, more than almost any other university. Only Stanford, Harvard and Columbia could match or raise it.</p>
<p>And Buffet went to PENN for undergrad (before dropping out).</p>
<p>@45 Percenter: While I completely agree with you that it’s super easy for Penn Undergrads to take grad/Professional school courses, I would like to point out that it is extremely easy and simple for undergrads at Brown to take grad level courses as well. All one has to do is show up to the first class period and ask the Professor for an override. In fact, undergrads are encouraged to take grad level courses at Brown just like the undergrads at Penn—I’m sure the same rings true for Columbia students.</p>
<p>AmbitiousMind07, I’m sure that what you say is true, but my point is that no other school, to my knowledge, encourages cross-registration for courses with the same breadth and depth as Penn, nor is it as much a part of their instisitutional identities as it is Penn’s. The courses to which you refer are graduate courses in arts and sciences. Penn not only encourages undergrads to take those courses (and has one of the easiest paths to submatriculation for students in arts and sciences to earn both a bachelors and a masters in 4 years), but also encourages them to take courses in many of its other graduate and professional schools. As I mentioned above, that means the Law School, the School of Design, the Graduate School of Education, the Annenberg School for Communication (home of FactCheck.org!), the School of Social Policy and Practice, etc. Brown doesn’t even have equivalent grad schools, and I’m fairly certain that Columbia doesn’t open up its grad and professional schools to undergrads to the extent that Penn does. If you know any Columbia undergrads, ask them how easy it is for them to enroll in classes at the Law School or the Journalism School or the other professional schools at Columbia. At Penn, that kind of interdisciplinary education is long-standing and well-established. For example, check out this page from the Penn Law School web site:</p>
<p>Again, it’s really a question of degree, and you just won’t find another top school that offers undergraduates such easy access to a curriculum of this breadth and depth.</p>
<p>I agree. In terms of student bodies and selectivity Brown, Dartmouth, Penn and Columbia are basically a wash. </p>
<p>Penn: More pre-professional, lots of New Yorkers, a little “preppy” and a little more “sceny” in my opinion- i.e. more Sex in the City types who know what Jimmy Choo shoes are. Lots of internationals.</p>
<p>Columbia: Intense place and I don’t mean academically. Lots of grad students. Social life is not that campus based. Not much of a community but for an NYCer that doesn’t matter.</p>
<p>Brown: More campus based. More off campus houses, community. More laid back. Less pre-professional, but not as liberal as its made out to be. Still pretty “chill”.</p>
<p>Dartmouth: Most community oriented, LAC (warm, friendly). Less grad students, more undergrad focused. Laid back but lots of random fun, which isn’t everyone’s thing. NOT in a city, but lots of stuff on campus to make up for it.</p>
<p>Wharton is equivalent to UWisconsin. Penn is a good school, around the level of Rutgers. It is good, but the student quality is lower than that of Brandeis.</p>
<p>The answer to this question has no relevance. If you intend to use it (or how he fared in UPenn admissions if he applied) in an argument against him, it’s ad hominem. Focus on simply responding to and with statistics, or outright ignoring him.</p>
<p>It’s more of a frivolous joke - there were some FOBs in the freshman writing seminars with grammar worse than gugupo’s (if only slightly), and they still passed.</p>
<p>The difference being that Penn has far more in the way of grad schools than does Brown. To wit: Brown can’t offer you classes in law school, because Brown has no law school.</p>
<p>
Columbia does not open up law school to undergrads. SIPA might be more lenient but I don’t know for sure</p>
</p>