<p>On these threads I keep reading about posters making a big fuss over the fact Columbia is ranked #4. Columbia is a great school no doubt, so what's the big deal about it being ranked that high. Same thing for Penn being #5, their great schools. Where I'm from Columbia is highly regarded as the best college in the state, along with Cornell. So why no love? Columbia's biggest plus is that located in the best city in the world, and no not everything in New York is expensive for a college student. The city is not just Manhattan.</p>
<p>There jealous that there school wasn’t ranked #4. Columbia definitely deserved the ranking.</p>
<p>Columbia has a unique advantage that no other school can compete with by being located in New York. Even though the significantly larger endowments of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford can give them far superior living spaces and learning facilities, no matter how much money they have, they can’t replicate that. Because Columbia doesn’t have Friday classes, students can take internships in NYC (Newspapers, Wall Street, etc) during the school year, and is the only school in the top ten that can offer that. Penn and Philadelphia is the closest comparison, but even in that case I’d guess Penn’s students would prefer New York as an internship location. You’d think a majority of the kids from Wharton end up looking to New York to get jobs after they graduate, wouldn’t you?</p>
<p>Because of this, I’ve always thought if a school were ever to overtake Harvard, it would be Columbia. If they had an administration that treated their undergraduates well 20-30 years ago, they might not be behind HYPS in terms of endowment. And, from what I heard as an admitted student, there are still problems with a notorious administration.</p>
<p>Its a total shame, because it would easily be considered the best university in the world if you managed to combine HYP-level facilities and endowment with the New York work opportunity. But as long as they fail to treat their undergraduates as well as the elite Ivies, they won’t make it. About thirty years ago, Columbia had a transfer student who couldn’t find housing as a Sophomore OR Junior, and had to live in some notoriously terrible housing off campus that Columbia often sent their students to. Whether for this reason or other reasons, he was unhappy as an undergraduate. He is now likely the most famous man in the world and refuses to even acknowledge his Alma Mater, instead touting his Harvard Law Degree. </p>
<p>These are the reasons a College benefits from treating its undergrads well, and as a Columbia Legacy (who chose not to attend) I hope that eventually Columbia can get someone competent to bring it to the top. There are definite reasons for Columbia to be ranked as high as it is. I sort of see it as a school that, on paper, should be ranked that high (strong academics, student body, location), but in practice, underachieves due to poor management.</p>
<p><a href=“http://gyazo.com/6526838c51c0308f9cff85b165c3acfe.png[/url]”>http://gyazo.com/6526838c51c0308f9cff85b165c3acfe.png</a>
Pic above is stats of columbia v stanford for reference.
Columbia seems to have a slight edge on Stanford (especially with class size), what’s the big deal?</p>
![http://gyazo.com/6526838c51c0308f9cff85b165c3acfe.png[/url]](http://gyazo.com/6526838c51c0308f9cff85b165c3acfe.png%5B/url%5D){kind=link}
<p>^those fields left to right are:</p>
<p>tuition (not relevant in rankings)
number of students in univ (not relevant for ranking)
acceptance rate
peer assessment from college deans and presidents
freshman retention
6-year graduation rate
25th-75th percentile sat score range
% of freshman in top 10% of high school class
% of classes under 20
% of classes over 50</p>
<p>stanford wins on peer assessment an acceptance rate, columbia wins on all the others. There are many more factors not included in that picture, which I couldn’t tell you about. There seem to be several metrics relating only to undergrads like class sizes, retention, freshman admission stats, student:faculty ratio where columbia seems to do better, it’s just a ranking methodology, if you think there are flaws, well there will always be flaws and dissatisfied people.</p>
<p>Columbia’s a fine school. No doubt about that. Note in the following analysis that I attend Stanford, and am biased towards it, but I try to be as objective and aloof as possible: </p>
<p>I think there’s a few problems people have with Columbia being #4, above other schools. CC users all know HYPSM. They are lumped together because they are generally agreed upon as the 5 most desirable and competitive places to get into. HYP are top three in the rankings, so that fits with everyone’s preconceptions. Stanford and MIT are not, and both are below Columbia. No one really cares that MIT is below Columbia, because MIT is really only attractive to HYPSM caliber students for its math, science, and engineering. Not to the extent of Caltech, but still to the extent that no one’s going to fuss much if a more well-rounded school (Columbia) is above it. </p>
<p>People are going to fuss about Stanford being below Columbia. Not only does this go against the blind CC mantra of HYPSM (which really isn’t a good reason to suppose that HYPSM are better than others), but it goes against a few other factors as well (which contribute to the HYPSM title in the first place):
-Columbia has a higher admit rate than Stanford.<br>
-Columbia has an Early Decision program in a time when moving away from ED is what the top few schools are doing.<br>
-Stanford consistently wins cross-admit battles versus Columbia.<br>
-Stanford has a higher PA score.
-Stanford is up there with MIT and Caltech for technical disciplines, which Columbia is not (not too far behind though), while still doing more than holding its own in the humanities fields.<br>
-Stanford’s average tuition is apparently 4000 dollars less per year.<br>
-Stanford’s endowment is twice as large while having less students.<br>
-Stanford has considerably less grad students than Columbia.<br>
-Stanford may have lower test scores on the 25th percentile end, but the 75th is comparable with Columbia’s (25th percentile disparity likely due largely to Stanford competing in the Pac-10). </p>
<p>Again, I’m posting all these to provide you with what I think are the main reasons why Columbia’s ranking struck such a discord with many CC members.</p>
<p>I’m not saying Columbia is a worse school than Stanford. For many people it is a better option, and vice-versa. I’m just saying that one can make a very strong case as to why Stanford, if one HAD to rank universities, should be above Columbia. I’m sure one could also make a strong argument for Columbia being above Stanford, although in my opinion it would not be as strong an argument :). </p>
<p>Anyways hope this helps. In the end it’s just one spot, and like always things will probably shuffle around next year even though the Universities themselves will hardly change.</p>
<p>monydad: Since all Stanford students are admitted to the university and not a specific college or department, there is no way really to exclude anyone.</p>
<p>I can predict the next post haha!</p>
<p>Just wondering, do those data items, eg acceptance rate, % top 10% HS, include data from students at Columbia’s College of General Studies (one of its three undergraduate colleges) ? I asssume Stanford’s data does not exclude some portion of its undergrad student body, does it? [edit: originally posted before #7 above]</p>
<p>Re: ranking discord, people’s perceptions are developed over long periods of time and it’s never been that high before. They are left to consider whether there has actually been real relative improvements, or just some shoving around of some data items that will soon be reversed.</p>
<p>Columbia is VERY respectable. CCers are just upset that their precious HYPSM order is balanced off. I think its great where it is, although I am jokingly p!ssed off that it stole MIT’s rank! </p>
<p>But I’m very glad for it and kudos to Columbia!</p>
<p>I think Columbia deserves its rank. It does beat stanford in some aspects. For example, it has the highest concentration of nobel laureates. It’s also a GREAT school for the humanities, and for funneling into business (NYC location), and has produced many notable leaders and politicians.</p>
<p>
If you’re saying how one school “beats” another in these respects, you should be making comparisons rather than subjective statements about just one school that add little to the comparison. </p>
<p>Unless of course your example was just about the nobel laureates and then your subsequent comments changed back to your original subject as to why Columbia is a great school in general and deserves its rank (aka your last three comments were not aspects where Columbia beat Stanford necessarily, but just more general notes as to why Columbia is a great school). </p>
<p>Sorry in advance if I came to the wrong conclusion at first, but I think I was still thrown by your statement made in that other thread.</p>
<p>USNWR failed to realize that there are many people, me for one, who would much prefer to live in a more rural area, and that being located in Manhattan, NYC might be a bad thing. Schools like Dartmouth with the D plan can provide similar internships and jobs to students as well.</p>
<p>And toxic93, NYC is definitely not the best city in the world. I would vouch for Hong Kong, but even in the US, Boston’s by far better.</p>
<p>lol, if we’re basing university rankings on number of Nobel laureates, UChicago would be far above these two upstarts. Nobody seems to care about UChicago’s ranking, though.</p>
<p>The thing is, nobody actually cares outside of CC. People are aware of the fact that measuring quality of education finely enough to rank schools with the accuracy the US News popularity contest claims to have is almost impossible, and they also know that even if such a list existed, individual schools wouldn’t suddenly become better or worse than whole clusters of similarly ranked institutions for no good reason. If university X really is superior to universities Y and Z, one year of bad administrative decisions or, as is the case here, different ranking criteria, wouldn’t be enough to make Y and Z better at providing higher education. It’s unrealistic to take a slight shift in these rankings for an indication of a difference in performance.</p>
<p>There are exactly two kinds of people who give a **** about Columbia’s standing: prestige-obsessed high-schoolers of the kind we have a surplus of on this board, and overbearing, overambitious parents of the kind we also have (see “I looked up my son’s roommate on Facebook and he’s gay, oh noz!”, “How do I choose an essay topic for my daughter?”, “We had two Bs in our freshman year, can we still get into Princeton?” [emphasis on the bizarre pronouns], “I did some research and Vanderbilt and Amherst look like the perfect safeties for my kid”, etc. for more information on this curious species). And they only care about Columbia’s standing because it contradicts the acronym that has become their religion.</p>
<p>Most people might take a look at this year’s rankings and raise an eyebrow at some of the things they see there, but very few will actually think, “Columbia is above Stanford and MIT; there must be a flaw in the methodology here and I intend to find out what it is. This cannot be borne! Stanford is quantitatively superior to Columbia! Let me call in sick and take out my calculus textbooks…” The average person doesn’t see university rankings as something that is necessarily meaningful or important, just like most people don’t watch movies for the sole purpose of predicting next year’s Academy Award winners.</p>
<p>
860 news articles ( [Google</a> News USNWR Rankings Articles](<a href=“http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1&cf=all&ncl=dowOO86on8lt1DMKvmwYpI9OjkyHM]Google”>http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1&cf=all&ncl=dowOO86on8lt1DMKvmwYpI9OjkyHM)) suggest otherwise, in addition to slots on TV news in almost every major market and a spot on The Today Show, amongst others.</p>
<p>There is certainly too much effort at CC expended on minutiae viz. these rankings, but it isn’t true that the “rest of the world” is unaware, or doesn’t care about them.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>nope, and all it takes is a simple search:</p>
<p>[List</a> of Nobel laureates by university affiliation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_university_affiliation]List”>List of Nobel laureates by university affiliation - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>just because you feel something should be true, doesn’t mean it is.</p>
<p>conficentialcoll, just Stanford then. So what?</p>
<p>pbleic, of course the US News rankings make the news, just like the Oscars (to extend the metaphor from my previous post). But the overwhelming majority of people do not actually think about them, respond to them emotionally or feel offended by them at any point during the other 364 days of the year.</p>
<p>Last time I checked only one college can say that the first African American President, African American Governor of New York and African American Attorney General (all of whom are currently serving their roles) are alumni…</p>
<p>pretty impressive, among other distinctions.</p>
<p>Without question, Columbia is undoubtedly one of the top schools in the county and world. No ranking or anyone on this website can deny this…</p>
<p>BTW, I did read somewhere that Obama has made donations to Columbia and not Harvard since graduating…;-)</p>
<p>Msauce, what in the world are you talking about? It is nearly unaminously agreed that former University president Rupp enormously enhanced nearly everything about Columbia in the 1990s into the 21st Century. A glance at the increased number of undergraduate applications supports that agrument. Columbia was always a great university, but today it is even stronger. Why do you think President Lee Bollinger left Michigan to accept the presidency at Columbia. As for the administration, things are much stronger in that regard also, otherwise the whole new 125th Street campus idea would have went over like a lead balloon with the city government. Here’s a news flash for you; the new campus project was recently approved!!!</p>
<p>Today, Columbia remains an elite universitiy that also happens to be popular with students. Most of the major facilities [including the dorms] have been rebuilt and there are more new facilities to come.</p>
<p>Hoorayyyy For Columbia!!!</p>
<p>Hoooraaay for Columbia!!!</p>
<p>“Why do you think President Lee Bollinger left Michigan to accept the presidency at Columbia.”</p>
<p>He wanted to live in New York City. I also agree that Columbia is a great university.</p>