I love Columbia’s location and the smaller campus, but columbia is slightly more expensive than stanford (even before accounting for the increased cost of eating out/living in NYC). Additionally, I’m worried about Columbia’s high stress/more competitive environment. I’m currently planning on getting a job straight out of undergrad without going to grad school. How do their econ departments compare, and is there any reason why it’d be worth paying extra money to go to Columbia?
Both are great in Econ and a number of other disciplines. Stanford has more international prestige, but Columbia has a great number of Nobels to its credit too (still more than S? Not sure). Columbia has old-school atom-splitting prestige, while Stanford’s prestige has come more recently from (primarily) tech-related achievements.
I think you’d be justified in choosing either based on location, environment, academic and social vibe. If you want four seasons, Columbia offers that; if you want to avoid winter, Stanford will shield you from it. If you want NYC, Columbia; if suburban San Francisco, Stanford.
If you wanted to go into Engineering or CS, Stanford has a decided edge, but Columbia is Stanford’s equal in other fields and probably (at the undergrad level) a little bit stronger in the humanities. A lot of people stick up for Stanford’s humanities, but you can’t butter every piece of bread equally. They’re surely solid, but everything can’t be as good as their STEM and Econ departments, which are world class. (Columbia’s strengths seem to be opposite Stanford’s, though they share Econ.)
Also consider the Core at Columbia: you’ll have more freedom to choose the classes that fulfill distribution requirements at Stanford.
You’ve argued elsewhere that two of the primary factors by which we should judge the quality of undergraduate institutions are endowment per student and undergraduate “focus” (which you define as the ratio of undergrads to graduate students). Not sure I necessarily agree because there are plenty of exceptions, but let’s run with it. By both metrics, Stanford is vastly superior to Columbia. (S: 1.5+ million vs. C: ~$358,000; S: ~0.76 vs.C: ~0.43). Based on your very own criteria, it is unclear how you could not recommend against Columbia in good conscience. Using your analogy, it is obvious that Stanford can butter every piece of bread equally and better than Columbia, especially since non-STEM investments generally cost less than STEM ones.
If you’re going to make the claim that Stanford undergraduate non-STEM couldn’t possibly be as good as Stanford STEM, then the burden of proof lies on you to support that claim. Assertion and random speculation don’t count.
This may not be dispositive, but the Rhodes Scholarship is generally regarded as the most prestigious and selective academic award available to undergraduates. This year, 4 out of the 5 Stanford winners were non-STEM majors: 1) history; 2) political science + feminist, gender and sexuality studies; 3) economics + public policy; 4) political science.
By comparison, Columbia’s two most recent Rhodes Scholars came from the School of General Studies (whose numbers Columbia doesn’t even report to US News because they would have a negative impact on Columbia’s rankings). Prior to that, Columbia hadn’t produced a single Rhodes Scholar since 2010.
Despite the fact that Columbia has had about a one-and-a-half century head start from which to build its history and reputation, Stanford has produced approximately four times the number of Rhodes Scholars that Columbia has. Assuming that well over a quarter of Stanford’s 100+ Rhodes Scholars are non-STEM majors (and this is a safe assumption), this means that there are more Stanford non-STEM Rhodes Scholars than all Columbia (STEM and non-STEM) Rhodes Scholars combined.
“By comparison, Columbia’s two most recent Rhodes Scholars came from the School of General Studies (whose numbers Columbia doesn’t even report to US News because they would have a negative impact on Columbia’s rankings).“
A full 30% of Columbia’s undergraduates are in the SGS.
To be fair, Stanford definitely does have a strong STEM focus, while Columbia does not. Of course, both have strong humanities/social science departments as well.
Columbia is such an amazing school. Its location, NY, will put you in the center of where the action is. It’s also well-loved by WS and the financial world. Columbia is prestigious world-wide.
That said, i don’t know how you would turn down a Stanford offer. Only quite a handful of people do. And, most often, it’s because they also got offers from Harvard or a full-ride from Yale, MIT and Princeton.