<p>81% in top 10th of graduating class
96% in top quarter of graduating class
100% in top half of graduating class</p>
<p>93% had h.s. GPA of 3.0 and higher
7% had h.s. GPA of 2.0 - 2.99 </p>
<p>That 96 and that 7 really bug me . . . How can those numbers be at all correct, considering the wealth of amazing applicants on here and the fact that even I (who was rejected my senior year of high school, ED, albeit applying to the SEAS when my math scores are consistently my lowest on everything from standardized tests to my grades in high school) had a higher GPA than a damn 2.99 and graduated near the top quarter of my class (significantly nearer to it than top half)?</p>
<p>Columbia doesn't place THAT much emphasis on ECs and essays and awards and all that, does it? I was thinking that maybe that 7% is due to AA and legacies, but is there really that much leeway places on URMs and children of alumni? (Not to mention that I did put myself down as Hispanic on my app, although some on here don't consider me to be Hispanic (Portuguese) and perhaps I should have called, but whether Portuguese truly constitutes Hispanic or not is pretty much irrelevant and I've already argued that point to annoying degree elsewhere on CC)</p>
<p>The link also declares that more than 1/3 of all ED applicants were accepted . . . Does that seem legit to any of you, or ludicrous, as it does to me? </p>
<p>I'm applying for junior transfer next year, and I am really incredulous to those stats. If they're accurate, then Columbia admissions are even harder to crack than I thought. Can anyone venture a guess as to what the deal is? I would figure to CollegeBoard to be pretty accurate . . .</p>
<p>Those stats are pretty accurate. Columbia is the smallest ivy, I believe, and as a result certain things hit it pretty hard. For example, it fields the same teams with the same number of players, all division 1 sports, as the other ivies, which makes the athletes a larger % of school. A lot of times, in order to get Division 1 quality athletes, you have to make some concessions on stats, and I would guess that the lower grades would be some of those kids. Also SEAS is a large part of Columbia, which has the best engineering program of the ivies, and some of those kids may be true math/science type geniuses but have issues with other parts of their apps.Throw in a few of their outreach programs where they look for disadvantaged minorities particularly in Harlem and neighboring areas, and you can see where the 7% with the lower grades come from. Also being in NY , they may get some truly interesting kids with near celebrity level talents but without some of the traditional profiles. Unless, you fit it any of those categories, however, don't think for a moment, that you will be one of those exceptions to the high rules. Columbia is very open about giving ED applicants a strong preference as is Penn. Princeton also accepts about 30%+ ED. Harvard also accepts a large number of ED apps. When you take in the ED spots alaready taken, the non ED accept rate for Columbia is about 8%, and in that group are some favorite sons as well. But if you are a transfer student, the numbers you need to examine are the percentage accepted for transfer each year at what point in college (as a sophomore, or junior), how many apply for transfer, and how many are in the class you want to join. One year I remember Cornell took no transfers at all because they had too many kids in a class; the yield was just higher than usual that year. If you can see that your prospective class is jam packed, the prior year data on transfers may not hold.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Columbia doesn't place THAT much emphasis on ECs and essays and awards and all that, does it?</p>
</blockquote>
<br>
<p>With its surplus of qualified applicants, Columbia can certainly choose outstanding academic performers who also have major hooks, too. I would say that Columbia emphasizes non-academic accomplishments as much as any Ivy, and probably more than many. As far as the 7%, don't forget there are categories other than URMs and legacies that may get admitted with lower academic stats: brilliant musicians, star athletes, celebrities or celebrity kids, development prospects, and others who have demonstrated a major accomplishment or outstanding leadership in their HS years. (Actually, I doubt that many legacies would get in with those scores unless they had something else going for them; even URMs would have to show something special, IMO.)</p>
<p>Still other explanations could include unusual grading/ranking situations: a student who incurred poor grades due to illness or family issues, or who started with awful grades but demonstrated great mastery of the material in later years, etc.</p>
<p>A small incoming class size and growth in the number of applicants make Columbia admissions tough - their admit percent is usually among the lowest, and overall selectivity ranking isn't far behind.</p>
<p>I agree with you, Roger, about Columbia admissions. The URMS and legacies that I have seen accepted to Columbia have had strong grades. The legacies all also had SAT scores well within the midrange. I have seen some legacies with some pretty strong development ties turned down from Columbia even with academic stats well within an acceptable range. I don't know anyone except for top athletes and a couple of very special cases get accepted to ivies with lower than a 3.0 gpa.</p>
<p>It's Columbia College, I think, that's the smallest Ivy undergrad -- around 4,000. If you add SEAS (the engineering college) and general studies students, undergrad for Columbia University is about 7,000. Still, I agree with Jamimom's main point that Columbia has to field a lot of teams from a smaller student body than its Ivy rivals and so may choose a talented fencer, rower, or football player with good stats over someone else with higher stats. (Well, they seem to do better finding the talented fencers and rowers than football players :) ) Columbia has a reputation for paying less attention to legacies than Yale or Princeton. But it also admits some students with outstanding talents in the arts -- people who are already building careers in music or theater in NYC and want to stay there.</p>
<p>Hmm, well, if those stats are as legit as they seem to be, then that gives me some hope, in a way. I definetly have a few hooks that I could use in addition to what will, by next year, be most likely a stellar college GPA as well as a not-awesomely-horrible (not too great by Columbia standards though) high school record.</p>
<p>By the way, I think Columbia may be one of the biggest Ivies. I think Brown and Dartmouth are near the bottom, but then again I'm not totally sure.</p>
<p>Thanks for the very pertinent and helpful info from everyone and if anyone has anything else to say about the topic or related to it, please do so.</p>
<p>Lucifersam, those stats would not pertain to you as a transfer. Do get some solid transfer data for yourself as that would be most pertinant info for you. Transferring is a whole different situation from freshman admissions.</p>
<p>Well, I do believe that the value of "hooks" could still hold plenty of water when it comes to transfer applicants if it holds as much as it seems to for freshman applicants. </p>
<p>I haven't been able to find any hard data on Columbia's transfer stats except that their acceptance rate is usually around 6% and a GPA of 3.5 or higher is supposedly necessary just for any consideration at all.</p>
<p>actually, Columbia is a small ivy. The main campus is very small and the student body is small as well. Harvard has about 2000 more students in their college, i.e. Harvard college is about 150% the size of Columbia college. But compare both to a state school, and you can see how small they both are anyway.</p>
<p>Columbia has a small undergrad component - ~4000 in Columbia College, 1300 in SEAS for instance, but a large graduate component ~14,500. (Though a large portion of that graduate component is at the medical campus in Washington Heights). So in a sense it is both a small (undergraduate) and large (graduate) ivy. By comparison Cornell has a very large undergrad population (13,500) and a small grauate (~6000). Still this is nothing compared to, say, Univ. of Florida's 48,000 students.</p>
<p>The University as a whole is the largest Ivy, totalling (I don't remember where I got this number from, but I'm pretty sure it is accurate) about 27,000. A lot of people are off at locations not on the Morningside campus of course.
The undergraduate component is very very small compared to the rest of the University.</p>
<p>The undergrad component is small, and yet they spend a lot of money and resources on it - therein lies the benefit of a Columbia College degree...</p>
<p>Members of varsity athletic teams at Columbia are drawn not only from "The College", but from other undergrad elements such as SEAS, etc, and ALSO (in the case of females) from Barnard.</p>
<p>Truth to tell, the pool from which athletes are drawn at "Columbia" is larger than Harvard's, not much smaller than Penn's, and significantly smaller than only Cornell's.</p>
<p>YOU WEREN'T SPECIAL...thats really all there is to it. You weren't unique, you probally weren't talented, and your DEFINATELY didnt jump off the page at the admissions people.</p>
<p>They want people with personalities, people that are interesting, not some person who prides themselves on a statistic...those are the exact people I'm trying to avoid. You can be extremely talented and not have a great GPA or SAT score. I speak from experience, I barely went to High School, got in trouble alot when I was younger, but always had an extreme ability to write...thats why I got into the top schools in the nation with pretty pathetic stats and not really trying at all during high school</p>
<p>I have to agree with almost everything that has been said here. It seems as if Columbia has taken the idea of a truly "well-rounded" applicant into consideration for admission. As we all saw from the purely stats based CC kids here, a fair amount got rejected even though their raw numbers were superb. Schools want kids who can help balance out a class, give a class a unique personality and contribute well to the academic environment. </p>
<p>I think people need to stop saying "Columbia doesn't stress EC's and essays that much." Actually, I think more than any other Ivy school, Columbia does stress the essay and EC's. As we saw from another poster who got an email from an adcom saying that their essay was outstanding, it shows that this is what helps define an applicant, rather than numbers on a page. </p>
<p>While one's GPA and SAT should be sufficiently high, they do not have to be "in the sky" to get into an Ivy league school, such as Columbia. I think what colleges like to see is a person who has found their niche and a specific passion that they can clearly identify. That way, schools know what kind of person they are going to get on campus. </p>
<p>Just my 2 cents...</p>
<p>And by the way, I did get into Columbia ED in December...so Go Lions!!</p>