<p>I wouldn’t say that, AstonMartin. Columbia has the Core and NYC. It’s important to take both into account.</p>
<p>kam2151 - those rankings are from the last NRC evaluation of all major academic departments at national universities. They’re freely available online, just google it.</p>
<p>i talked to someone who goes to PENN today and she described it as "PRETENTIOUS</p>
<p>Pablo,</p>
<p>I am gonna take a bit of issue with referencing NRC. Saying it was the last evaluation makes it sound like it was last week. The rankings were last (and only) done in 1995. I know they are the most comprehensive rankings of departments (and new ones are due out), they don’t really account for growth of departments like Columbia’s economics department over the past decade, etc., and perhaps Penn has grown significantly since. I don’t really think they are quite that relevant.</p>
<p>And in case you find me to be a Penn hater, let it be known - the one thing I like about that study and most is that people often think Penn is not an intellectual place, and has bad academics - this should be proof enough that it is a big time academic powerhouse and is often undervalued as an academic place. I don’t think it is as good as Columbia, but then again I don’t think any school is as good as CU - that’s just bias.</p>
<p>just pointing out that merteapablo’s economic department ranking is off; columbia econ is better than penn’s (grad level). i don’t care what rankings say otherwise; it’s just the truth.</p>
<p>not that departmental rankings make much difference at undergrad level, though. it’s really the overall strength of the university that matters. at the ivy level, you’d expect roughly even academics at any school, barring a handful programs which are especially good at blah blah blah school.</p>
<p>what about wharton vs. columbia econ major??</p>
<p>P.S. this sounds like a joke question but if you start to think of things holistically and in terms of overall undergrad experience…</p>
<p>and how much of a difference would it make between wharton and CU econ in terms of job placement and grad school placement?? significant enough for it to be a deciding factor??</p>
<p>lastly one more question
Has anyone here grown up in nyc, gone to columbia, and found themselves unsatisfied with their college experience because they couldn’t experience a new place?? please give me advice…I’m so indecisive about these two</p>
<p>ETA: my entire family lives in central america and they all know the columbia brand name, but not upenn and they’re kind of pressuring me to attend CU and are surprised I’m considering penn. I’m trying not to give into the pressure (haha) and I’m trying to make the best decision for myself</p>
<p>^wharton does slightly better with wall street placement - Columbia is still a top 5 wall street feeder. If you do Columbia econ and do well, it’ll open nearly all the doors that Wharton will, and once the door is open you’re on your own, no degree or anything can save you. If you want to go straight to wall street, Wharton gives you a better training. Columbia has one advantage which is that you can get yourself a round-the-year internship at a bank or finance firm. Many firms actually advertise these positions on our career website. In the fall I dropped a resume and got a very serious call 24 hours later about working at a private equity firm specializing in clean energy and sustainable development. I turned it down because I was too busy during the spring semester. </p>
<p>For general education, Columbia does a better job, Wharton is training (talk to ilovebagels, a penn grad, about this). Wharton can sometimes be an anally competitive and narrow place. Columbia econ can give you great training for wall street (we have many business and finance classes), but it isn’t the same as a business school. Columbia econ is top notch, in the last 5 years it’s become a top 5 department, people who disagree are out of the loop or going blindly by old rankings. Those top 5 would be (in no particular order): harvard, princeton, columbia, chicago, mit.</p>
<p>pureadvisory, i’m trying to parse your comment but i really can’t.</p>
<p>I would definitely say Penn. MUCH more academic freedom. better social life. and more of a campusy feel.</p>
<p>^hey mr. stereotype, where do you get such accurate insight?</p>
<p>Penn has one university policy. Columbia has core = 1/3 of your classes.</p>
<p>Social life at Columbia is cliquey. Many kids go to the bar scene in NYC. </p>
<p>Penn has a bigger campus, less kids go into Philly. </p>
<p>I have a friend at Columbia and two cousins who went to Penn.</p>
<p>this is nonsense, a small minority go to the bar scene in NYC. and going into nyc is a bonding activity, no-one ventures out alone. Penn doesn’t have MUCH more academic freedom. even with the core you have a lot of room to explore what you want to study at Columbia.</p>
<p>NRC is too old for you? In that case, go by USNews rankings, which are only a few months long in the tooth:
[Search</a> - Economics - Graduate Schools - Education - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/grad/eco/search]Search”>http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/grad/eco/search)</p>
<p>Penn is still ranked higher than Columbia.</p>
<p>In fact, this study of the most influential econ faculties has Penn in the top 5, not Columbia:
<a href=“Loading...”>Loading...;
<p>again all rankings are about 5 years old. Columbia economics has been transformed in the last 5 years. We’ve hired top faculty from H, Chicago etc. put in funding and won the nobel prize. If you’d like to be a rankings slut so be it, but ask anyone who’s in the loop.</p>
<p>Relax, if that’s the truth then I will accept it. Didn’t Krugman win the Nobel last year, by the way? He’s Princeton.</p>
<p>i never said anything about age of the rankings. they’re just wrong. anyone whos looked at graduate econ seriously knows this, as confidentialcoll has pointed out.</p>
<p>the usnews is clearly off (are they ever accurate?); econphd rankings have better methodology but aren’t so accurate anymore - for example, NOBODY believes that penn econ is better than princeton’s. i don’t understand why you would come here and try to argue about the quality of the department, solely on the basis of rankings, if you’re not actually familiar with the field.</p>
<p>krugman won as a sole recipient, which is quite impressive. i don’t think the point was that we won this year, but we’ve won quite recently (phelps and stiglitz in 2000s).</p>
<p>most would say that the core is columbia’s greatest advantage (with nyc competing for the prize as well). even the biggest core skeptic eventually enjoys the experience substantially, and it is a far more memorable experience than a major course of study (i’ll remember the core in 60 years more than i’ll remember Modernist Literature of the 1910s). </p>
<p>just because it doesn’t make sense to you, doesn’t mean you should start by propogating myths.</p>
<p>yes the core is for some and not all.</p>
<p>but supposing prospective students are average 18 year olds who are smart, but not quite Einsteinian then the core serves a very practical educational purpose in focusing students on their strengths and improving their communicative skills. </p>
<p>at this point after hearing so many of these false arguments i think that core hating is more of a fear of the unknown than ever reasonably justified. explain to me how you plan to spend 40 courses at other institutions and how 10-15 courses that are meant to make you a more aware scholar some how prevents you from accomplishing your goals? how do you aim to replicate the advantages of the core in sparking intellectualism? i mean you can say you don’t want it - and that is a fine answer. but don’t denigrate its worth because it wont let you quadruple major (though i have heard of a student who had done as much) even though no graduate school will care how many majors you take on so long as you have experience in their field. i do await a reasonable justification about why the core is bad when so often it is spoken about as being a substantive reason for attending columbia above other top schools (including hyp). say you dislike it, or that pedagogically you believe it to be a bad idea (at which point i’d ask why apply to Columbia, though i gather more core hating is coming from ■■■■■■ than cross-admits), but when students bring forth abstract notions of it being restrictive or limiting - it infers that you are being prevented from doing something. you still graduate with a major at columbia (well most do, ha) you still get to specialize and have top flight teachers. so what about the concept of having a foundational academic experience sound so revolting. </p>
<p>most supposed deficiencies of the core are often disproved - a) i took courses like these in high school, well you read material of the kind, but did not have the same academic experience, b) it will prevent me from starting on my major, it often informs you of other major options and you can begin completing your major the moment you arrive on campus. further, columbia majors are often ‘fuller’ and larger than its peers. so the fact that so many students complete majors and the core and do everything else they do is a significant rebuttal. </p>
<p>that being said - columbia is an intense place in ways that penn probably is not. it is a tough city that i think sounds awesome, that you might find intimidating. i think it takes a certain gaul to want to be at columbia - a brashness that is not quite the arrogance of our peers, but a little more Sopranos, a little more renegade. that is what makes it great. and in the end it is collegiate environment, but not traditionally so - it is i would say better because it is different; you could go to any of our peers and insert diploma and you could see very similar students; if you go to columbia you are assured to have an experience that is not like any of the other schools (insert core+city+student body diatribe).</p>
<p>Wharton definitely does better at placing onto wall street; on the other hand, the one wharton undergrad I know became an auditor for Ernst & Young.</p>
<p>
this is pretty accurate. because we don’t have much of a sports culture, we don’t have anything to get explicitly rah-rah about. on the other hand, as i’ve said before, i met hundreds upon hundreds of students at columbia, and i know exactly one who really didn’t enjoy their experience. by and large columbia students aren’t outwardly proud about their school, just inwardly proud.</p>
<p>iville - i said they were old, because they are. and pablo, you know nrc has more reputable data collection than usnews so i await the new study. and if we are going to play interpret the graduate school rankings and their relevance to undergrad - we might as well really pull them apart. if penn sucked at your subspeciality when columbia was better at it, you would not go to penn over columbia - so check out subspecialities if you are more curious about how someone applying to graduate school might actually react.</p>
<p>lastly, i will say that despite columbia’s recent hires, you haven’t quite heard similar response rates among graduate school applicants - and a lot of the usnews survey is based on the quality of graduates and their ability to train great future professors. in this regard, columbia is a few years away from really hitting it big time. though the recent hires have clearly made ugrad econ very very good - i would be curious how phds are doing - that is the indicator of the study you use (and whose relevance to ugrad study is tangential but not necessarily a strong correlation).</p>
<p>Wharton blows Columbia econ out of the water (I’m not Wharton btw…in case that matters). Please, there’s no argument there…Wharton is on the same level of HYPSM. Confidentialcoll u forgot Stanford in your list of top five econ departments and in any case, you’re pretty much wrong. Columbia is on the same tier as Penn in terms of econ and that has been pretty much the consensus on collegeconfidential (there’s a thread somewhere, but I’m too lazy to find it). Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, Stanford make up the topmost tier fyi. Of course Columbia people are biased in favor of their college, but I would encourage the OP (as many others have) to visit both campuses and see for yourself. Personally, I detested everything about Columbia when I visited and thus chose Penn instead (for ED). It really is a very subjective thing and nothing anyone says on these boards should sway you one way or the other.</p>
<p>Yes, I suppose the bottom line is that the OP needs to visit and see which is the most attractive choice, for whatever reason.</p>
<p>As I’ve illustrated, the most popular departments are on par with each other, with the nod towards Penn if you want anthro or linguistics, and towards Columbia if you’re more a hard sciences person. If you’re psych/English/econ - which is the vast majority - it won’t make a difference.</p>
<p>So, visit the campuses, scope out the social atmosphere, and make a choice. You probably won’t be upset with either.</p>