<p>Hello, I was accepted into early action UChicago and regular decision Columbia SEAS for undeclared engineering, and I am trying to decide between the two schools. UChicago is offering me 13k more in aid than Columbia, which I'd be paying almost full tuition for. I visited UChicago and loved the campus, but it seemed like the students were perennially stressed and focused solely on academics. The two schools are similar in terms of being located in big cities, with Core curriculums, and similar rankings. Any advice?</p>
<p>Are you interested in engineering? It looks like so since you applied to SEAS. As you have probably known Chicago does not have engineering majors except some small footprints on computer and molecular.</p>
<p>Both schools are very similar. New York may be more interesting than Chicago while UChicago’s campus is prettier and more spacious than Columbia’s. UChicago’s housing system is good, especially for first years. Not sure how Columbia’s residential halls work.</p>
<p>Have you visited Columbia yet? I have heard from Columbia’s students that they really study hard (as hard as Chicago’s). Chicago’s students pay much attention to academics and some may be stressed or look intense. There are not many so called easy classes - the ones looked easy still require a lot of time. But I do not think students spend all their time studying. According to my D’s experience many of her housemates spend 30-60 hours (instructions/homework) per week. Some spend more and the others less. The students have spare time doing other activities such as clubs, sports, community services, newspapers, musics, or other fun stuff.</p>
<p>It is a hard decision. If you are inclined to engineering then Columbia is the obvious answer. Are you going to negotiate with Columbia for more FA? Columbia’s tuition and room and board are more expansive than Chicago’s even not by much. You may already have had the idea of the difference between them.</p>
<p>Either way you will not go wrong. Best luck!</p>
<p>If it was Columbia College or Barnard this is a legitimate decision, but SEAS is a totally different menu of offerings. You really need to get yourself straight about engineering and if that is right for you. 13K x 4 should not be enough to make this decision if you can legitimately afford the remainder of the tuition. Put it this way, if you went to SEAS, what would you major in? At Chicago? </p>
<p>I am still undecided, to an extent, as to what I want to study. I applied as undeclared engineering in SEAS since I enjoy science and math, and am interested in either Environmental Engineering or Financial Engineering at Columbia. Two very different subjects, I know.</p>
<p>At Chicago, I am similarly considering Chemistry/Environmental Studies or Econ. I plan to go work for a few years after graduation, then go to law school. </p>
<p>I am not interested in a technical engineering education, but I want to go somewhere where I have a good amount of academic flexibility and access to internships. UChic meets all these criteria. SEAS also appeals to me because of its engineering/liberal arts core, the location at NYC, and the general involvement of students in a lot of activities.</p>
<p>Is the “life of the mind” such at UChic that students can’t find jobs after graduation? I don’t want an atmosphere as pre-professional as say, UPenn, but studying theory all the time doesn’t appeal to me either. </p>
<p>Here are some data of UChicago’s undergraduate outcomes for the past four years. </p>
<p><a href=“Post-College Outcomes | CareerAdv”>https://careeradvancement.uchicago.edu/about/outcomes-data</a></p>
<p>The data are still very high level aggregates. But you can see majority of the students have found jobs 10–12 month post-graduation - most of those successful job-hunters have found jobs at the gradation. About a quarter of the students have entered graduate programs. </p>
<p>class 2010 - 61% full-time employment ten month post-graduation (36% at graduation)
class 2011 - 66% full-time employment ten month post-graduation (43% at graduation)
class 2012 - 71% full-time/part-time and other employment 12 month post-graduation (51% at graduation)
class 2013 - post-graduation data is not available (54% at graduation)</p>
<p>Of course class 2010 had more difficult time to find jobs than class 2013 due to the recent recession.</p>
<p>Traditionally Science and Technology are not strong landing places for UChicago’s students. However it looks like those areas have attracted more UChicago’s students recently. </p>
<p>class 2010 - 4% landed jobs in Computer Technology and Information Services
class 2011 - 7% landed jobs in Computer Technology and Information Services
class 2012 - 6% landed jobs in Science and Technology
class 2013 - 13% landed jobs in Science and Technology</p>
<p>I was accepted to both colleges a couple of years ago, and came to Chicago, having fallen in love with it as a junior.</p>
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<p>I assure you, UChicago students do extremely well after graduation. Almost everyone who is interested in a career in business in any capacity, joins the UChicago Careers in Business Program. They send interns to companies like:
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<p><a href=“https://careeradvancement.uchicago.edu/business/about”>https://careeradvancement.uchicago.edu/business/about</a></p>
<p>Most of my friends in UCIB are interning with companies from that list. Its honestly pretty impressive. I myself will be interning with Ernst & Young (EY) over the summer, and was offered internships at another of the big 4 audit firms, and I’m nowhere near being one of the better candidates here (honestly, I feel inferior in many ways very often). UCIB claims that 71% of seniors were given offers from companies they had just interned with over the summer, and that 98-99% of UCIB students were placed (job or prof school) after graduation.</p>
<p>ROI statistics are skewed because of the number of UChicago students that go for further study (85% going for grad within 5 years, the highest of any school in the nation), as well as academia/research. This is a quote from Payscale, the most frquently cited ROI rankings (via Forbes):</p>
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<p>However, considering only the extremes which gets rid of this asymmetry, what we see that UChicago ranks 6th in terms of colleges with the wealthiest alums with a combined wealth of $144b, while Columbia is 4th with a combined wealth of $116b. Perhaps even more telling is that in a similar ranking, UChicago was second in terms of self-made uber rich, after UVA (lower on the overall list) and ahead of Princeton/NYU.</p>
<p><a href=“3 Public Universities Made List of 15 Schools With the Wealthiest Alumni - ABC News”>3 Public Universities Made List of 15 Schools With the Wealthiest Alumni - ABC News;
<a href=“The 10 Colleges Most Likely to Make You a Billionaire (Harvard Is #1) - The Atlantic”>The 10 Colleges Most Likely to Make You a Billionaire (Harvard Is #1) - The Atlantic;
<p>Our students may seem perennially stressed, but we really do enjoy out time here. Either way, it fosters this unique and wonderful sense of fraternity among the students. And if you want to, its not hard to find a good time at all. The residential system is one of the best things about the college, giving you a launchpad to make friends from, and a family that will be supportive no matter what, not to mention the frequent and fantastic house events. The college is the perfect distance from downtown Chicago, close enough (25 minutes by bus) for travel to barely be a consideration, while distant enough to have a residential college experience. When I was faced with the same decision (but with the Financial situation inverted), these were some of the major factors for me. UChicago and Columbia have different takes on the core, so you should check out which one you prefer:</p>
<p><a href=“https://bwog.com/2012/04/29/east-coast-or-no-coast-uchicago-vs-columbia/”>https://bwog.com/2012/04/29/east-coast-or-no-coast-uchicago-vs-columbia/</a></p>
<p>But in all honesty, given the fact that you loved the campus, and their status as peers in every sense, I think the $50k+ over 4 years should edge it out for Chicago.</p>
<p>Good luck and congratulations! You should be proud.</p>
<p>Chicago and Columbia both have core curricula, but the Columbia core is significantly reduced for engineering students. I think at Chicago you are likely to spend more time on humanities and social science courses than at Columbia, which may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending.</p>
<p>For engineers, Columbia’s non-STEM core amounts to five required semester courses, one of which you can place out of with AP credit, and three electives in nontechnical fields, all of which can be satisfied with AP credit. Chicago’s non-STEM core consists of 9 quarter courses (equivalent to six semester courses) from a restricted list, for which no AP credit is available, plus a full year of foreign language (which you can satisfy with AP credit). The bottom line is that both colleges ostensibly require an academic year’s worth of non-STEM classes, but at Columbia you can whittle that down by half with AP credit, and at Chicago you can only get out of 25% of it with AP credit.</p>
<p>-deleted by author-</p>
<p>FROM THE “bwog” link:</p>
<p>Saskia Sassen, Professor of Sociology first at UChicago and now at Columbia, agrees. Hyde Park is remote; “there is no Manhattan or Brooklyn.” As for the student bodies: “It’s almost a tribal thing abroad, [graduates] have so much pride for saying, ‘I am from Chicago.’ ” She adds: “My experience at Chicago was a real engagement [on the part of the students] with difficult intellectual questions. Some Columbia students are not very interested in those questions.”</p>
<p>Her final verdict on Chicago? “It is a very intense place.”</p>
<p>Q.E.D.</p>
<p>What attracts me to Chicago (for graduate school) is the reputation of it being pound for pound the most intellectual campus in the nation.</p>