I’ve been talking to some alumni from my high school as I’ve been looking at colleges, and I’m a little worried because the two kids I know at Cornell both just say its really difficult. The grade curve is tough, there’s a ton of academic competition, and simply that going to Cornell is a grind. I know Cornell has a fun social scene outside of academics, but I don’t feel like spending 4 years going crazy due to academic pressure.
I go to a highly ranked, very rigorous private school now and most graduates say college is pretty easy in comparison. One kid I was talking to who goes to Brown said he has a 4.0 GPA in college and works half as hard as he did in high school, and another grad who goes to Harvard says its 100 times easier than high school.
I’m just worried that, if I do end up at Cornell, it’ll be a more stressful academic environment and I won’t do as well, making it harder to get a job or get into grad school afterwards. Just curious if anyone else here knows anything about this topic.
I believe Cornell IS tough academically.
However I don’t believe it is necessarily tougher than other schools with comparably capable, or yet more capable, students.
Some of the experiences that helped form my beliefs are:
When I attended, another student’s sibling visited from Harvard. As it happened, both of them were TAs for entry-level English seminars at their respective schools. The one from Harvard looked over the papers the sibling was grading, and said the standard of work/writing was far below that at the comparable course at Harvard.
When I attended, the book for the “honors” high level Physics course at Cornell, for only top students, was the same one that was used as the text for the standard physics course at MIT.
There is a (probably former) CC poster who transferred to Cornell from Tufts. He posted that he found Cornell to be easier than Tufts. However that poster transferred into AEM, not CAS.
My own D2 took courses at Barnard and Columbia, then transferred to Cornell CAS. She said the work demands and level were essentially the same.
When I first started looking at schools with my D1 we visited many campuses. I found students at a number of comparable schools who all were finding their schools tough academically. I concluded “there is no free lunch”.
I could be wrong though. and also there may a number of exceptions.
When this comes up I ask myself:
if schools have comparably capable students, with no less interest in attaining the best subsequent destinations after college, why would one be particularly easier?
At schools in general though, some majors are generally considered more difficult than some other majors. You wouldn’t want to be comparing courses taken in pursuit of a pre-med major to a {insert generally considered easier] major. At basically any school.