UChicago v Columbia v Brown v Duke

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
1

Hello,
I was recently accepted at all these schools, and I was wondering what the general impression of which school someone would pick. I’m leaning towards Uchicago and columbia, because of the core curriculum and intellectual spirit, as well as the prestige (not going to lie) but I’m torn then. I am leaning towards majoring in the humanities, such as public policy, government, literature, economics, etc. I have a few questions, and please don’t take any offense to them, I’m just trying to build a collective opinion.

  1. Is there a reason why Brown and Duke would be chosen over Columbia and Uchicago if I like the core curriculum best?
  2. How is the social life like at chicago and columbia?
  3. Chicago is rising up in ranking (us news) but columbia is decreasing in acceptance rate (5.8 percent '2021), which do you think is the generally most “prestigious school”? I’m so sorry if this is not an acceptable question to ask.
  4. Does the factor of being an “ivy” matter or does chicago permeate those standards?
  5. What are the different adj to describe each “student”?

Thanks so much!

2
  1. No you2) 20% of students are in Greek life at UChicago and it is growing rapidly. Bar night every Wed night. Houses have lots of social events. Broomball, Midnight soccer on the Midway. Enough said. Not the old UChicago
  2. Lay prestige - Columbia. Academic prestige - UChicago
    4)Yes, Yes
  3. Normal?

If you are extremely Liberal or left leaning go to Columbia, Brown or Duke. You will be happier there. UChicago adminstration will drive you crazy and make you angry almost every day. If you are extremely conservative… Sorry bad choices all around. If you are moderate… You will do fine at all the above schools, but you may be happier at UChicago because the school administration actions will not make you cringe or roll your eyes

3

Re the Core – two things to think about and one way to think through it.

First, are you attracted to the Core because you want to take courses in a wide variety of fields and become a broadly well-educated person and/or because you want to be surrounded by other kids who want to take a wide variety of courses, etc.? If the latter is in the mix, then Core should be a voting issue. If it’s just the former, then not necessarily. Any of the schools you’re looking at will enable you take lots of great courses in different fields and will give you time to choose (and change) your major. And then you can make your own decisions about what kind of courses you take (survey vs more specialized) and tailor them to your interests. If you trust yourself to explore and to experiment with things outside your own comfort zone, then you can just choose your own adventure. But if you think you might choose the path of least resistance without the discipline imposed by the Core ( and regret it later), then go for the Core.

Secondly, if you’ve decided you want the Core, the next question is how much Core do you want and what kind? Do you want it to involve everyone reading the same set of Great Books and to basically be over by the end of your sophomore year? Or do you want a Core that gives you choices among multi-course sequences with some overlapping themes/texts and that may involve all four years of your coursework? Columbia tends toward the first model; Chicago toward the second. Columbia’s Core is pretty traditional and the syllabi are easy to find online. Chicago’s is more diverse and syllabi are harder to track down without a student account. Chicago’s Core strikes me as more interesting but more demanding than Columbia’s, but YMMV. FWIW, you could certainly do a Columbia-like Great Books curriculum at UChicago – those texts are well-represented in Chicago’s Core offerings – just not the only option.

One way to think through this would be to look at catalogs, imagine a likely major, and plot out how you’d meet both Core (or distribution) and major requirements in 4 years. It’s a bit of work (don’t choose electives, just look at the structure/sequencing of different requirements and also think about how study abroad could fit in the mix if that’s a priority) and probably only worth doing once you’ve narrowed your choice down to two schools. And whether it’s worth the effort even then will also depend on how central coursework will be to your choice.

Re reasons to choose Duke or Brown over Chicago or Columbia. You could probably spend less time on classes and emerge with a better GPA from the former two schools than from the latter two. And any of the four give you access to good jobs and grad schools. So depends on how you want to spend your time in college, what you think is fun, and where/how you’d like to have it. Visiting should go a long way toward helping you figure that out.

4

@denydenzig Lmao bar night, broomball, and midnight soccer are old UChicago! They’ve been around for years. And I wouldn’t exactly use Bar Night as indicative of UChicago’s social scene if you want make the argument it’s thriving and fun and not just a bunch of people drinking in the middle of the week to forget their sorrows.

UChicago also has a ton of (pretty happy) really really left wing people - including the class of 2020 who came in after the infamous letter. Hint: Liberal activists are never happy with the administration at any school, that’s why they’re activists. I spent a week at Brown (clearly, the most conservative school in the country) and met plenty of leftists who had plenty of stuff to complain about vis a vis the administration there. And for all the problems with UChicago’s administration, you still have a 50-50 shot of being taught Marx by a literal Marxist in certain required core classes.

To answer OP’s questions:

  1. Sure, they both have bigger party scenes, Duke has better engineering and other useful stuff and it’s way easier to get a higher GPA at Brown. Duke’s in the south, Brown’s in New England, so there’s an environment difference. But if you want the core, though, probably best to come here or Columbia.

As for Columbia vs UChicago’s core, I +1 everything @exacademic said. It’s a personal preference.

  1. I don’t know much about Columbia - UChicago has parties but they have to compete for student’s time along with the city of Chicago and everyone having a lot of work. Also, a lot of people at UChicago don’t particularly like partying. Still, there is a party scene if you want to get into it. It’s solidly okay.

  2. Columbia. If you’re looking for people to be impressed with you cause of where you go then go to Columbia.

  3. Some people care, most people don’t.

  4. Don’t know much about Columbia, but at UChicago a lot of students are pretty self-deprecating, kind of nerdy (or at least has a few subjects they are mildly obsessed with), want to learn a lot, and people tend to be pretty indifferent to jobs and internships beyond knowing you should probably find one. People complain a lot. It’s a unique environment.

You should visit both schools and decide for yourself.

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The Chicago’s administration may be different from, say, Yale’s or NU’s but its students are almost the same as those at Yale or NU ideologically. Anyway they are 17 - 23 years old young people.

Yes, Chicago students complain a lot! LOL

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@HydeSnark I do agree with much of your characterisations of the University, though I have to say that is your experience mostly, and that the Chicago undergrad program is diverse and has many different parts. For me, as someone who is friends with more preprofessional kids, and more future lawyers, consultants, and bankers, I’m going to put in what I think.

I think there are lots of very polished, extremely successful people at the University, the type of student that David Brooks described in his piece ‘the Organization Kid,’ (great article by the way, I highly recommend you read it). This is the type of kid you’d find at Princeton, or Yale, for that matter, who is extremely accomplished, professional, takes work seriously, and is seriously involved in campus. To a large extent these students have been brought here by the work done by Dean Boyer and Nondorf on the College in the last 15-20 years, and these people do indeed care about getting jobs and getting into fellowships, etc, i.e. ‘achievement,’ in general.

The most exceptional group of people I know has been at UChicago. However, one difference, I believe, that separates UChicago’s undergrads from many others, is that I believe that the people that do pursue finance, consulting, etc, are doing it not only because it provides them with a certain amount of prestige and status, but because they find these fields genuinely intellectually enervating and interesting. There is much less of a focus on social hierarchy at UChicago than you’d find at Princeton (with its Eating Clubs) or Duke (with its extensive system of Greek Life and other Selective social groups on campus), and the people that ARE people that resemble the Ivy-graduates in terms of their career choices, are for me, people who seem to be doing it for the right reasons, and not just to scale society’s pyramid. That’s not to say that there aren’t people at the Ivies who don’t find their ‘prestigious’ career choices genuinely interesting, but in general, the flatter, more relaxed social scene at UChicago, with its general disdain for flashiness and hierarchy pushes less people automatically into these fields. Another thing to note is that UChicago, out of all these schools, has an income distribution in its student body that most resembles the rest of the US, which makes it less elitist, more flat, and, in my humble opinion, a great place to receive an undergraduate education.

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Enervating?

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@exacademic wrong choice of words, oops. Should have used invigorating - my mistake!!

9

Do you like sports?

As you know Chicago is a higher tier DIII school while Duke is a DI powerhouse. Columbia and Brown are lower tier DI Ivies.

Some students need to have a big sports scene to fulfill their college experience while others think big sports scene disrupting the normal campus life. You have good options on that front.

10

The reason you might decide to attend Brown or Duke over Columbia or Chicago is that you visit and feel like the environment and students are a better fit for you. They are all excellent schools, so fit can be decisive.

Remember, that the other two don’t have a core curriculum, but you can definitely make your own.

People say that Chicago games the US News rankings, and it is true that they are not ranked consistently well across a broad spectrum of rankings like Columbia is. Chicago is a high quality program, but I would not go there because of the ranking.

In terms of the Ivy brand, I don’t really think that matters. In real life, when you get together with relatives, I suspect most average American’s have never heard of either school. Ask your average American to name as many Ivy League schools as they can. You will find that most people can name zero or maybe one.

In terms of breadth of graduate school options/offerings, Columbia and Duke have more comprehensive offerings than Brown and Chicago. For example, Columbia has more applied graduate schools like Education, Engineering, or Nursing that Chicago doesn’t offer. That may matter for certain students because most schools have a tendency to favor their own grads when admitting to graduate school.

Overall, if you were my student, I would suggest that any one of these four schools, can be better for the right individual student. I would suggest that you visit as many of them as you can and assess the students, the clubs, the social life, and the departments that interest you. Choose the one that impresses you the most.

11

Duke has more lay popularity due to its DI powerhouse status while Ivy brand is well established (some people may not know Brown and to a lesser extent Columbia are Ivies). Chicago has some reputation of “teacher of teachers” among academics. All four schools are excellent schools and one would be lucky to attend any.

Rankings can rise and fall (Duke went as high as #3 twenty years ago and Chicago fell as low as #15 ten years ago). All of them should get people’s attention one way or another. You may base your own perspectives and goals to choose.

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@ivygrasper101 specific USNews positions within the top 10 and acceptance rates do not dictate prestige. unsells is good at creating prestige tiers (top 10, top 20 etc), not individual positions. example: Princeton has always been ranked higher than Harvard but Harvard is more prestigious than Princeton. Same goes for Princeton,Yale vs Stanford.
Also acceptance rates alone are not a reliable metric of prestige when you get to this level. Columbia has a lower acceptance rate than Yale. Still Yale is def more prestigious than Columbia.
Prestige is a kind of fuzzy convolution of many different variables (academic strength, research output, selectivity, yield, cross-admit split, prominence/power/wealth of alumni base, history of the school).

Personally, I feel the ivy title matters a bit unless we are talking about Stanford or MIT. The Ivy League is a really strong brand. But Stanford, MIT have insanely strong brands themselves, only a notch below Harvard’s brand, so it doesnt really matter for them. People are split about this though. Many people think it matters, many don’t.

I would rank the 4 four schools in term of overall prestige as follows: Columbia > Chicago > Brown > Duke

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To Game: verb. Any action of a school whose rank you disapprove of, specially if it ranks higher than a school you happen to like. Also any action of a school that denied admission to you or somebody you care about.

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I think it’s important to remember that global rep rankings are based quite a bit on graduate/PhD output and rep, not on the quality of the colleges. I think USNews is more focused on the quality of undergraduate programs – at least, that’s what they’re after. I’m not sure why Chicago and Columbia are ranked ahead of Stanford and MIT for undergrad (double-check me – i think that’s still the case), but it’s based on metrics that USNews believes reflect the quality of the colleges and disregard grad or PhD reputation or success.

I think the Ivy brand matters somewhat: Northwestern and Johns Hopkins are every bit as good as Cornell and Brown, but in some kids’ minds the former two will have to fight harder for their vote because they lack the Ivy swag.

I think for overall undergrad rep, these are very close schools. But if I were to nitpick, I would say that:

Chicago = Columbia > Brown = Duke

…with the phrase “barely, if you really want to be picky…” in front of the “greater than”.

But anyone lucky enough to be admitted to these four should disregard rep/prestige and focus on cost and fit. They’re all great.

15

Congratulations to the OP. It’s quite an achievement to get acceptance to all four wonderful schools. In my subjective opinion, (so take it with a grain of salt), UChicago > Columbia > Duke > Brown, by a hair. Having said that, with everything else being equal, your fit to the school rules over other metrics. You should trust your guts that would tell you which school you would like to attend and be successful in it. Good luck.

16

In addition to what the previous posters have expressed so eloquently one of the biggest differences between Columbia and UChicago is the quarter system. Some love it–you can take more different classes which works really well for those with multiple interests and some hate it–often you are learning the same amount of information in a quarter that your friends at other schools will learn in a semester.

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Update: I’ve taken Brown and Duke off my list of considerations. It is between Chicago and Columbia now. Leaning towards Chicago, but Columbia still lingers throughout my thoughts. So I will be visiting both this month!

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Good choices.

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I’d say the biggest difference between Chicago and Columbia is the size and crowding. Columbia has 30,000 students, including 8500 undergrads, all on a few square blocks in New York. They all share one patch of open outdoor space, and indoor and outdoor space are at a premium for virtually everything. The common core classes and upper level seminars at Columbia are small, but the intro level classes in many disciplines can have several hundred people, including the students from Barnard.

As far as prestige goes, there is essentially no difference between the two.

20

Ok, I refrained from saying this yesterday because I thought it was too anecdotal. I still do, but the “can this happen here?” thread about multiple suicides at Columbia made me decide to put it in the mix anyway, with that caveat.

The kids I’ve seen (through my daughter’s school and her sport) who go to Columbia are very different from the kids who go to Columbia even though, on paper, they look very similar (hardworking, talented, and high-achieving kids who are great at/love both science and humanities). The kids in this cohort who choose Columbia tend to be more pre-professional/competitive/aggressive/outgoing and the Chicago kids tend to be quieter/shy but friendly/thoughtful (both kinds)/collaborative. I think the combination of NYC and Ivy League plays to an “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere” mentality whereas the Midwest/non-Ivy choice attracts the “hooray, I finally get to do my own nerdy thing in place where that will seem normal!” kids.

FWIW – which may be nothing!