<p>ilovepeople712, would you mind listing some of the differences you found between columbia and chicago? thanks.</p>
<p>Brown: 5
Columbia: 10
Cornell: 0
Dartmouth: 0
Harvard: 0
University of Pennsylvania: 1
Princeton: 1
Yale: 0</p>
<p>This is an unanswerable, and largely uninteresting, question. All of these universities are very similar to one another in many respects, and each has individual quirks and features that give it a character distinct from all the others.</p>
<p>The Columbia-Chicago comparison is pretty facile: both big-city urban, both strong core curriculums. But Columbia seems much more pre-professional and employment-oriented, and in some important respects is Chicago’s diametric opposite. The tone of academic and political debate at Chicago is far more civil, intellectual, respectful, and based on shared values than at Columbia. When I read about the controversies at Columbia around Nadia Abu-el-Haj and Rashid al-Khalidi, two Palestinian-American professors who were popular and widely-respected at Chicago, and who can’t walk across the campus at Columbia without being reduced to symbols by one faction or another, Columbia seems like an academic version of hell. There are probably more conservative students at Chicago than at Columbia, but the tone of debate there – and the tendency of people on each side to acknowledge and to incorporate good ideas advanced by the other – is much better. Barack Obama is associated with both universities, but his idiosyncratic pragmatism (with liberal cast) and willingness to associate with people in different parts of the political spectrum is pure Chicago.</p>
<p>Brown and Chicago are curricular opposites, but as others have noted they seem to attract fairly similar kinds of students. (My kids dispute this, by the way. Although I can’t tell the difference between them and their friends at Brown, both of them think there is an important strain of anti-intellectualism and ambivalence about college at Brown, and much less diversity of views. I’m not endorsing that, just reporting it.)</p>
<p>And I’ll say this: My wife and I are constantly impressed by how similar our children’s undergraduate academic experience at Chicago is to ours at Yale (which we thought was perfect). Yale and Chicago are very close in one important metric – they are the two comprehensive research universities whose undergraduates go on to get PhDs at the highest rate. That is a pretty significant indicator of a high intellectual climate at both schools.</p>
<p>Having known several kids now who went to Yale, I would say that I agree, Yale is perhaps the closest. They do not have same requirements as the Core, but the academic tradition and civility seems to be there. </p>
<p>Comparisons between Chicago and the Ivy’s have been going on for some time. My favorite is this quote from William James: “…Did you ever hear of such a city or such a University? Here [at Harvard] we have thought but no school. At Yale a school but no thought. Chicago has both.”</p>
<p>Imperfect, thanks for your thoughtful post. It had so mcuh to do with the topic. :P</p>
<p>You can’t really compare Chicago with another Ivy, because in my point of view, Chicago is in a league of its own. But in terms of academic environment, BROWN comes closest to Chicago … but Brown is much more liberal than Chicago from what I’ve heard and people at Brown are so much more carefree.</p>
<p>Am I the only one who thinks that the question itself is obnoxious? (Not you, OP, but your ivy-wh*re friend.)</p>
<p>In my experience, Chicago is known more in Latin America than schools like Cornell, Penn, Brown, Dartmouth. The whole ivy-league concept is pretty foreign (obviously) to everyone outside of the United States, we just know big-name schools like Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Columbia, Berkeley.</p>
<p>In most of the rest of the world it’s more like: Cornell Ware?, Penn & Teller?, Yale locks?, Brown what?, and Darth Vader? However, everybody and their mother has heard about Harvard, Princeton, and The Chicago Boys! :)</p>
<p>The Chicago Boys!! In Chile, everyone and their mother dreams of sending their kids to Chicago, seriously. When I was a kid, I remember my grandparents telling me, “tienes que estudiar en la Universidad de Chicago como los Chicago boys!” hahaha…too bad I ended up at UVirginia instead, Chicago was too expensive :(</p>
<p>I wish I was in South America then, in my country its only
Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT they acknowledge…
Some samplings of such ignorance as follows. </p>
<p>Chicago? What? Is U of Chicago the same as Chicago State? (My close friend who asked me this) </p>
<p>Or… no offense to any Pepperdine grads out there, but my cousins and extended family all think that Pepperdine is better than UChicago… academically… which aggravates me to no end. </p>
<p>And on the comparison on Ivy note, I would reiterate Columbia 
just because they’re as proud of their Noble Laureates as Chicago-ers are.</p>