<p>While there are some departments for which I’d rather go to Columbia than Penn **at the grad level<a href=“such%20as%20poli-sci,%20and…umm…well%20i%20guess%20that’s%20it”>/quote</a>, at the undergraduate level, both will give you an equally rich undergraduate education, albeit in different ways.</p>
<p>To me, Columbia’s Core is a plus, and Brown’s non-curriculum (sorry, “Open Curriculum” in marketingese) is a negative. Penn’s distribution requirements don’t give all its undergrads the same rigorous broad education as Columbia’s Core, but it does force students to expand beyond their intellectual comfort zones, which is more than can be said for “no-math?-no-problem!” Brown.</p>
<p>Penn has a better social scene than Columbia and academics that are better (or at the very least, broader) than Brown. Plus it scores an epic win in food carts. And while NYC is unquestionably a superior city to Philadelphia by just about every metric you can come up with, Philadelphia is a better college city for precisely that reason. It’s big enough to offer a lot but not so big as to suck the live out of the campus.</p>
<p>Arguing about whether Columbia or Penn has better academics is like debating whether Gabriel or Michael is a better archangel, or which Faberge egg is more valuable. You can identify differences either way, here and there, but overall the differences don’t matter at all.</p>
<p>Generally, ilovebagels has it right. Penn vs. Columbia really turns on how much you like Columbia’s Core (some people do, many people don’t, including a number of Columbia students), how important NYC is to you, and the tradeoff among on-campus life, the surrounding city, and off-campus life for students in the surrounding city. Also, Columbia (like lots of NYC institutions) has a tendency to be very, very self-important, and forces from outside the university community weigh in on a lot of politicized issues there in a way that doesn’t happen almost anywhere else. Penn vs. Brown is a little more nuanced. Brown has a nicer neighborhood in a smaller, but still petty nice city, and RISD next door rather than Drexel, so there’s more multicolored hair around. The open curriculum attracts a slightly – but only slightly – different mix of students, with definitely fewer Wharton types (who abound at Columbia). I don’t know why anyone would want his math class full of grumpy English majors, or his English class full of grumpy pre-meds, though, so I question whether the open curriculum ought to be a negative for anyone. Also, Brown has fewer grad students, something that has plusses and minuses.</p>
<p>I chose Penn over Columbia and Brown last spring. I narrowed it down the P and C (Brown was just too hippie for me, and after doing a summer program there, I didn’t like Providence much). What decided it for me was the Penn has an exponentially better social scene and ultimately, Penn is like a larger version of the prep school I attended, which I loved. Penn is urban without being in The City. NYC is incredible. I definitely want to live there some day, but I didn’t want that yet. Lots of my friends go there though, and they’re loving it. Columbia is much more independent, much more city (rather than campus) oriented, and has a very intense core curriculum. I didn’t want any of those things yet. Wish your brother luck with his admissions process!</p>
<p>So you can score better than they do! I keed, I keed. The real reason is not because I want to be in a class with people who don’t want to be there, but because every so often the person who otherwise would have never taken that class actually end up enjoying it. I was a grumpy STAT-111 student who went on to do a statistics independent study, and I never wanted to do Art History but I ended up loving the course and the professor.</p>
<p>muerteapablo, there is something seriously with basing one’s opinion of a school on the US News college rankings. Those rankings, which have been heavily criticized in past years, differ greatly from virtually every other set of college rankings, many of which have Brown higher than Penn. In fact, The New York Times recently published data detailing the choices of applicants who were admitted to two schools, and which they chose. For those that were admitted to Penn and Brown, a majority chose Brown. Penn has never had the reputation of Brown, and through certain “techniques,” such as admitting half the class ED to achieve lower admit rates and showing admitted applicants’ SAT scores rather than enrolled students’ SAT scores, Penn has shown better in the rankings, while Brown has slipped. Or, perhaps, you could compare Penn to Cornell, which you hate with such a passion. If you were to contrast Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences to Cornell’s, the Cornell school would actually have lower admit rates and higher scores. </p>
<p>But this is irrelevant, since it would be utterly insane to judge a college based on one ranking, and for your brother to do so is naive and shortsighted. What truly matters are the many other variables: location, size, specific programs, etc. But, if you and your brother truly care about prestige to such a great extent, Brown has Penn beat there, too.</p>
<p>You criticize my brother’s use of US News, and to defend yourself you cite… other rankings? What hogwash. Could you even cite those other rankings? The only 2 that I can think of are the Atlantic and the Princeton Review for selectivity, and they BOTH rank Penn higher. I’m not done with you yet, though. 4 more things:</p>
<p>1) The “Revealed Preference” data, with which I am WELL acquainted, was procured during the years of 1999 and 2000. Penn was hardly the school then that it is now, and the same goes for Brown (although in opposite directions, I’m afraid). Since then, the schools have at least broken even, certainly in the eyes of 17 year-old seniors who were 9 years old at that time. As long as any of them can remember, Penn has been in the top 10, and Brown has not. US News is a self-fulfilling prophecy, whether you like it or not.</p>
<p>2) Cornell’s school of Arts and Sciences does not have a lower acceptance rate or higher average SAT scores than Penn CAS, this has already been discussed on another thread. If you’re so terribly interested, you can compare the two with documents from the respective schools’ websites.</p>
<p>3) The SAT scores that Penn provides US News and other various college guides are the SAT averages for the matriculated students, not merely those that they accept.</p>
<p>4) Whatever the US News has colleges reveal, they all do uniformly. If Penn was asked for whatever statistic you preposterously claim they use to “inflate” their numbers, Brown was asked for as well. Penn certainly isn’t lying about the data. Or is this what you are claiming?</p>
<p>Look, I don’t want to get into a flame war here, so you can either choose to respond factually to each of my points, or stop polluting an otherwise informative thread on an isolated forum with your vitriolic lies (that’s what I call things that are untrue).</p>
<p>Thank you for giving Chad10 a much-deserved thrashing. I will not stand by silently as the right and honorable name of my alma mater is so callously besmirched by someone who was either denied entrance into her hallowed halls or worse, a Brown student. Bah!</p>
<p>(Are you in college? If not, come to Penn with your brother and we can snub the lower ranked schools <em>grins</em>)</p>
<p>@muerte: although I agree with you that Wharton is more selective than Columbia, I’m sure there are people who turn down HYP for Columbia as well. some kids just feel an affinity towards Columbia’s core and NYC location.</p>
<p>Indeed they do, but I meant in greater number than they might for other programs (such as Columbia).</p>
<p>I met a kid in CAS (not Wharton) who turned down Harvard to come here. He said he just liked the atmosphere here more. I really regained my confidence in humanity at that point, to see that someone could think that clearly outside of their ego and public-perception to make a choice about how they felt PERSONALLY about something. Because even Yale gets shafted by Harvard, and certainly not for any quantifiable or true reason. It’s because of public opinion. And frankly, it’s appalling.</p>
<p>Haha yeah, I decided I wouldn’t apply to Harvard, because I don’t really want to go there…a lot of people I know go there, and they don’t necessarily enjoy it. And I was afraid if I do apply, and somehow get in…I’d choose it over the name. Of course, I’ll see in about 11 hours about Penn…</p>
I would also keep an eye out for Stanford, which seems to be shafting even Harvard at times.</p>
<p>
Neither do I to be honest. Anybody could complain that Penn is “only good for Wharton” etc, so there’s no point in trying to bash other schools for their majors’ popularity</p>