Proposals to make Columbia great

Colleges & Universities A-Z Columbia University
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<p>We all know Columbia is great, but it's far from perfect. What do you propose would make it better? My proposals are as follows:</p>

<p>1.) Re-name CBS after a major donor and use the donation to make it a top-4 Business school. [Chicago used Booth's money to climb the ranks]</p>

<p>2.) Re-name CLS after a major donor and use the donation to make it a top-3 Law school.</p>

<p>3.) Add an undergraduate business program. This is a huge draw for Penn. Columbia would become a whole lot more attractive if it had an Undergraduate Business program, it is a top-5 B-school after all. </p>

<p>4.) Add a Brown PLME-like program for those competitive pre-med kids.</p>

<p>5.) Cut the size of the GS student body to make it better and more accomplished overall. It shouldn't be a backdoor to a Columbia degree. [Yale only takes about 20 non-traditionals a year, and they do fine in assimilating into the undergraduate population, unlike Columbia.]</p>

<p>6.) Cut useless programs in the GSAS that cost the university money. This should reduce the total population of the university a little bit too, making the Columbia experience a bit more personal.</p>

<p>7.) Re-name the Medical School after a major donor and use the donation to make it a top-10 Medical school.</p>

<p>8.) Renovate the undergraduate dormitories. This would go a long way in enhancing the undergraduate experience and may drastically improve alumni donations.</p>

<p>9.) Admit more legacies, and children of major donors to raise funds and increase the endowment. [I am neither, so no bias]</p>

<p>10.) Increase funding for athletics. It goes a long way in increasing personal connection to the school. </p>

<p>And finally, and most important of all,</p>

<p>11.) Get new leadership. </p>

<p>Post your proposals! [I did this for fun btw. I'm just an admitted high-schooler and no expert on these issues. :)]</p>

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<p>i will just comment on a few of your ideas. renaming the school after a major donor is actually known to weaken the brand. that is why all the best schools in the country are not branded schools (hls, sls, yls, hbs, sbs).</p>

<p>gs is an interesting issue, but i think columbia in the end realizes that it is a peculiarity that makes them more integrated into the world in which we live than purely an elitist institution.</p>

<p>columbia does have a new business concentration, and as for a plme program - there is a reason that no hypsm school has such a program, once again, conceding on the grounds of pre-professionalism is a sign of weakness. columbia already has an exceedingly high placement (along pretty much only with hypsm) in med/law school placement. indeed it might be undesirable for many students to have to be set with columbia p&s as their only option (plus i doubt that p&s would want to feel as if they would have to guarantee a certain number of spaces in their med school to students that didn’t have to work their butt off in undergrad).</p>

<p>i don’t quite get what programs in gsas you would cut, but then we would be like some british universities that completely got rid of certain humanities and have severely cut funding on anything but science.</p>

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<p>my proposals have always been rather simple.</p>

<p>1) improve communications network, make sure that the public and especially columbians know more about what is going on at the university. there is fascinating stuff that gets lost.</p>

<p>2) streamline bureaucracy to remove redundancies, and develop a training program to make sure that the best of the best who work in higher education are working at columbia.</p>

<p>otherwise i am pretty much sold on a lot of things columbia already does.</p>

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<ol>
<li><p>Get rid of the administration.</p></li>
<li><p>Get rid of all the graduate students.</p>

<hr></li>
</ol>

<p>In response to some of your original proposals you have to realize:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>Columbia and Penn are possibly the two largest degree mills in the Ivy League. These two schools have <em>TONS</em> of randomass Masters programs which are filled by internationals form no-name schools, which a year and $50,000 later, allow them to put “Columbia University” on their resumes for life.</p></li>
<li><p>CLS/CBS are all okay (#4, #7 respectively), but they won’t become top-tier programs anytime soon. When it comes to the tippy-top of B-schools, GSB, HBS, Wharton (and Chicago for econ/finance), these will not get displaced for historical reasons. MBA’s, more than anything else, is a self-perpetuating mechanism. The more alumni a school has (and the more loyal the alumni), the better opportunities for students, and the corresponding increase in rank. When it comes to law schools, there’s no way in hell Columbia will ever break the triad YLS, HLS, SLS. I have several CLS friends - all of whom absolutely <em>HATE</em> the place. </p></li>
</ol>

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<p>There was surprisingly one greek event held on the steps the other day (a ‘talent’ show of sorts), and it was funny because the performance that got the loudest acclaim from the crowd was a song entitled “**** Columbia”.</p>

<p>anyway… if someone wants some insight into why Columbia administration single-handedly destroy undergraduate life, check out some of the comments here:</p>

<p>[Bacchanal</a> Seeking Greener Pastures – Bwog](<a href=“http://bwog.com/2011/04/21/bacchanal-to-be-held-on-west-lawn/]Bacchanal”>Bacchanal Seeking Greener Pastures - Bwog)</p>

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<p>another suggestion:</p>

<p>Move the campus to a safer part of New York State…</p>

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<p>Yeah move it away from the safest big city in America, that has lower crime rates than Cambridge, MA, New Haven, CT and Philadelphia, PA.</p>

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<p>Correcting one point, by Tru, as a partner in a major NYC law firm, I would like to say that absolutely everyone considers Columbia Law School a “top tier” school by any definition. It is one of the top 5 in the country, possibly one of top 3, and differences between these are completely insignificant. (This by the way is also my perception of the undergraduate school.) Opportunities open to a CLS graduate are great, and it is very ignorant to claim that somehow CLS is not top tier. And of course Morningside Heights is a safe and beautiful area and NYC is Columbia’s great strength.</p>

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<p>huh? 10 char</p>

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</p>

<p>I guess we’re in a particularly lucky time… why don’t you hold me to this prediction:</p>

<p>Columbia is going to be just as “lucky” going forward as it is right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if Columbia gets a little luckier in the next 5-10-15 years. Call it whatever you want. </p>

<p>I wonder what its going to feel like when you work for someone else, I’m sure they’ll be lucky to have you.</p>

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<p>12). re-vamp the entire IT infrastructure.</p>

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<p>I just want to point out that while they renamed the Engineering School, it is nowhere close to being a top 5 program. But there is no doubt that it is improving.</p>

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<p>iceui- yeah, kind of a sign of weakness, alas it was over a decade ago.</p>

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<p>OP, you terrify me, and I’m embarrassed that you were admitted to Columbia. I also don’t understand why you accepted, since you seem to disdain everything that makes Columbia unique. You clearly belong somewhere like Wharton (maybe Stern, though I doubt you’d ever consider a non Ivy/HYPSM) or Princeton. Your list is not a recipe for making Columbia into a great institution; it’s the sales talk of an “admission consultant” speaking to the delusional status-obsessed administration of a mid-tier school that wants desperately to increase its rankings. Columbia, quite simply, is not that school. And especially if you’re now a Columbia student, you would do well to understand the actual values, ideals, and philosophy of this school.</p>

<p>1 and 2: You can’t just buy your way to the top, especially when you’re already a top-tier school. Besides, adgeek is absolutely right about brand dissolution. When you’re a top-tier school with a famous Ivy name, you name buildings after alums. You don’t name whole schools after them! SEAS was an exception to the rule because they needed money and weren’t ranked very highly. </p>

<p>3: That’s just ****ing stupid. Columbia is a liberal-arts school, not some pre-professional hellhole. I don’t think you understand what actually makes liberal arts universities “great.”</p>

<p>4: Not necessarily a bad idea, but you once again fail to see the value of the liberal arts. Columbia undergrad is not pre-professional!</p>

<p>5: You really are an ass. GS is one of the unique jewels of Columbia. The fact that so many non-traditional students can be seamlessly integrated into classes with “traditional” college-aged undergrads (where they frequently dominate the class) is amazing. GS students are far from a liability and GS is definitely not a “backdoor” into Columbia. If anything, GS should be given more money (and perhaps renamed) so they offer better financial aid and attract more students.</p>

<p>6: This is absurd. What “useless programs” are you referring to? (No wait, let me guess: the humanities!) Columbia is a top-tier university in large part because of its graduate humanities departments.</p>

<p>7: See 1 and 2. Columbia is already a “top” medical school, especially in the city.</p>

<p>8: Not sure it would help with alumni relations, but this is actually a good idea!</p>

<p>9: What part of “more money is not an absolute good” do you not understand? Making Columbia into (more of) a bastion of undeserved privilege would hurt the school greatly. Columbia is not Princeton, thank god.</p>

<p>10: No! I don’t disagree with supporting athletics if you have the money, but Columbia’s appeal is not in its athletics, and this is undoubtedly a good thing.</p>

<p>11: What the **** does this mean? You don’t like the current leadership?</p>

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<p>Columbia is a liberal art school? I don’t think it is a liberal art school. </p>

<p>It offers engineering majors for both undergrad and grad, so I don’t think it’s a liberal art school like, say, Amherst College is.</p>

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<p><a href=“Perelmans Give Penn Medical School $225 Million - The New York Times”>Perelmans Give Penn Medical School $225 Million - The New York Times;

<p>^ That, or similar gifts, could have gone to CP&S if Columbia actually had competent leadership. Sigh.</p>

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<p>Some great stuff here.</p>

<p>A big chunk of the newly admitted GS class is comprised of dual-degree candidates with Sciences Po in France. They’re almost all straight out of high school and have pretty stellar academic credentials. </p>

<p>And, yes, I feel like sometimes GS appears to cast a pretty wide net to capture a relatively small number of talented people. But, like the others, it’s a continually evolving school. And for now, I feel like it’s headed in a cool direction. Also, it is worth noting that the entire GS population is only about 3/4 the size of one CC class (including the post-bacc program). So, in terms of trimming down the size, how small should it be? Last, I agree with pwoods, it is a jewel. If you want to improve it, great. But discounting it all together and you’re probably missing the whole Columbia philosophy.</p>

<p>All that said, what about other back doors?</p>

<p>I’ve been involved in athletics long enough to have seen coaches hound the admissions office, help get what might be an academically subpar student admitted, and then not be able to do anything when that same athlete quits the sport their sophomore year.</p>

<p>I feel like a lot the suggestions we are offering sort of shore up the undergraduate prestige and boost the ranking of the school. But, would it change or improve your education in any real way? Would people suddenly stop skipping class and writing papers at the last minute, etc? Or, when talking about greatness, do we mean adding value to the brand - just being better without doing better?</p>

<p>Last, as someone who has hung out in Lewisohn, I can tell you that the Harvard and Yale post-baccs are forever goofing on CC/SEAS dorms, dining halls, perceived lack of school spirit, etc. But they’re here, right? Let’s not sound like them when we discuss this stuff.</p>

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<p>Wifey, you’re missing the difference between a liberal arts college and a liberal arts curriculum.</p>

<p>Pwoods, thanks for so sensibly articulating your frustrations with the OP’s post. Spot on, my friend. All of it.</p>

<p>Last, having grown up in Philly and spent lots of time in New Haven, Morningside Heights is a really nice change of pace.</p>

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<p>pwoods, what’s wrong in making Columbia more like Princeton? It’s widely acknowledged that Princeton’s undergraduate experience is far superior to Columbia’s. Becoming more like Princeton will only enhance the undergraduate experience at Columbia.</p>

<p>I’m certain truazn and some of the other disgruntled Columbians would agree with me on this.</p>

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<p>the reason i applied to Columbia and not Princeton was because they don’t have the same undergraduate experience or ‘vibe’ if they didn’t i wouldn’t have applied to columbia</p>

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<p>“[…] what’s wrong in making Columbia more like Princeton?” </p>

<p>There already is a Princeton. </p>

<p>“It’s widely acknowledged that Princeton’s undergraduate experience is far superior to Columbia’s.”</p>

<p>Is it? Pretty much everyone I know calls Princeton the best 13th grade in the country. They take no transfer students, no non-traditional students, etc. If it’s better, it’s better at doing certain things that a lot of us Columbians want nothing to do with.</p>

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<p>iamanapp, if you’re an entering first-year at Columbia this fall, enter with an open mind. My Columbia son is blissfully unaware of the negative stereotypes published on this website, and would likely be surprised at the complaints expressed. Like everything else in life, if one undertakes the Columbia experience with an upbeat attitude, one will find the positives.</p>