Bwog wishes everyone a very merry fall break!
By
Bwog Staff on
Nov 03, 2007 
23 Comments
Bwog wishes everyone a very merry fall break!
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23 Comments
@19/17/14 I agree with Manhattansville, but Columbia cannot continue to expand in NYC forever. Within the next hundred years, Columbia will have to expand again. Adding 18 acres to our 34 is not too great an addition, compared to some of our Ivy colleagues. Granted, a lot of Cornell’s 700 is just space.
I think it would be very possible to build a ferry between NJ and Riverside Park. Riverside is literally two blocks away, and we could move all the residences to the other side of the river (where land is cheaper), free up space on Morningside, etc.
@17/14 To be fair, Columbia does have Journalism and TC, but those do not train money-earning professions.
The decision to move B-School is a good one, to provide more room and a new look. Uris looks like horrendous.
Putting more economics into SEAS curriculum is an excellent move, and probably is the only good way to up SEAS’s ranking. It is physically impossible for SEAS to compete with the giants of engineering, so it must specialize. SEAS should focus on churning out more businessmen with good engineering background.
@14/17/19 And this is why Manhattanville is so crucial to Columbia staying relevant as one of the leading research institutions in the world. It’s not the 1960’s anymore, but the Arts and Sciences and Engineering haven’t had a serious upgrade in facilities in about 30 years.
Just to emphasize the importance of keeping the best talent at your own graduate schools- Among Columbia’s heavyweight donors, Jerome Greene, Larry Wien, and Ira Wallach were all Columbia College, Columbia Law. Gerry Lenfest is just Columbia Law (he’s donated almost 3x as much money to CU as to his college, Washington and Lee), and he’s already donated 100 million, and counting.
@Err I forgot about CEPSR… but before that I think the last major building was Fairchild for the Bio department in 78.
@endowment I’ve grown to 7.2 bn, my dear SEAS kid.
@FYI We go to the premier factory school of the Ivy league. Most students enrolled each year. Most degrees churned out each spring.
Want to know where you stand on the totem poll? Columbia ugrads make up less than 30% of the student population here. That’s lowest in the Ivy League. The only school that comes even close to being that far under 50% is Harvard at 35%.
But here’s the big difference. Columbia’s endowment per student is third lowest in the ivy league, on par with Brown and Cornell. What’s the big deal? At those schools ugrads make up 72 and 66 percent of the school population respectively. Harvard, the school with a similar stuent population ratio has roughly 5 times as much endowment money per student to go around.
In short we go to one of the poorest Ivies, and as ugrads qualify for an even smaller slice of that pie than our other ‘poor’ brethren.
This has been a PSA. Thank you.
@Ummm...Where the hell are you getting your info?
Columbia’s yield (student enrolled / students accepted) is less than 50%. There is no way we enroll more than Cornell each year fyi. And obviously we subsequently dont turn out that many degrees compared to Cornell…
How the hell are you defining on Par? Cornell’s endowment is 4.5Billion. We’re 6.4, not including Kluge or Kraft donations. They have 13,000 undergraduates. By your calculations they should have an endowment of 10 Billion (population of Columbia seas and cc is 6000)
fact check before you do rhetoric and have a SEAS kid shoot you down. Better yet, take a stats course
@Read 1) The percentages refer to the percentage of the total student body made up by undergraduates. Columbia had 22,386 degree students enrolled for the 2006-2007 school year. (Source: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/opir/abstract/students.html) Cornell had a total enrollment of 20,638 for the same year (source: http://www.cornell.edu/about/facts/stats.cfm). Now you do the math – There aren’t as many undergraduates at Columbia as at Cornell. Undergrads make up a smaller percentage of the students at Columbia than any other ivy. I’m saying that as a whole, Columbia University probably isn’t really bothered with us. It’s got other things to pay attention to. And that, statistically at least, isn’t the case at almost all the other Ivies (where ugrads make up a significantly greater portion of the student population.)
2) Degrees: Columbia conferred 8787 degrees at the end of the 05-06 school year. Cornell conferred 6,021. Same sources as above.
3) Endowments – Do the math. Columbia’s recent endowment figure (7.2B) comes out to 292k, if you include all the students (including the non-degree students who’re still using resources). Cornell’s comes out to 248k. Brown’s at 285k, Penn at 333k and Dartmouth at 600k. HYP have 1.4, 1.7, and 1.9 million each per student, respectively. They’re clearly in a league of their own. Why do we even bother to call them peer schools? It’s almost perverse.
So either way you slice it, on paper, Columbia doesn’t have much going for being an undergraduate here.
@Yeppers I agree with the spirit of your posts. Columbia’s undergraduate education, while not on the same level as Cornell or Brown or even most of Penn’s undergrad schools, is far from the likes of HYP. What really constitutes the reputation of a school nowadays are 1) endowment 2) teacher:student ratio 3) exclusivity of a degree. Columbia gives out way too many undergrad degrees (SEAS, BC, CC, GS) to be as prized as HYP. There’s a reason why Princeton kicked Bryn Mawr out and why Harvard basically bought back Radcliffe.
Columbia’s current reputation stands on stilts. The NYC thing is just a marketing scheme to get more applicants. We need to genuinely improve infrastructure if we want to top some of the other schools.
When it comes to reputation, grad schools don’t matter as much as undergrad. Many successful people do not need to go to grad school even today, especially the talented students who enroll in the Ivy League.
Furthermore, alumni donations come mostly from undergrad alum, not grad alum, because that’s what people immediately identify with to the question “Where did you go to school?”
Columbia’s overemphasis on its professional schools needs to give way to the undergrads.
@14/17 I agree that NYC is essentially a marketing gimmick that Columbia leverages as best as it can (and now with CUArts, actually delivers on the promise somewhat).
I’m OK with Columbia’s emphasis on graduate schools. They’re the ones that get a school headlines for research that raises its profile. Having a premier Business, Medical, or Law school has it’s own benefits – the very best of your undergrads will want to stay. The problem is that while very good (all top 10 prgorams) Columbia isn’t in the very top tier in any category (at least according to US News). Penn has Wharton, and it’s med school is a top tier program. The brightest Columbia undergrads aren’t coming back for grad school.
@to be fair douchebags themselves serve a purpose. Arts students (myself included) do not
side note – was I ‘being fair’ to douchebags or Art students. I have been hopelessly vague
@Son of Knickerbocker As Columbians, we’re just as douchey as Yalies, but not quite in the same league as Princeton yet. Penn and Cornell wishes they were at our level of douchebaggery, but sadly they have not reached it yet. For instance, not only am I an avid croquet player, I also play squash! And much of my wardrobe consists of Brooks Bros. and J. Press! Trust me, there are more of us at Columbia than you realize. Score one for the Establishment.
@fyi, Yale has an entire week off for Thanksgiving!
@Yes, but they need the week to play Croquet and Polo, as well as rehearse the art of being a douchebag.
@ridiculous Our calendar is ridiculous. There’s no excuse for it.
@That's because Columbia kids are dumb.
@Right I don’t really see how Columbia having given us a weekend, Election Day, and the Monday in between and calling it “fall break,” and then scheduling half our midterms after it has anything to do with our own intelligence.
But maybe that’s just because I’m too dumb. I really should have gone to one of the other “Ivy’s” mentioned above, because everyone knows that a degree from there really means something.
@effcolumbia damn columbia for making us work for our degrees! even during this tiny little excuse for a break they give us, everyone I know is studying their ass off, while our friends at penn, dartmouth and brown never do shit and get degrees just as pretty as ours.
@Come on now... Columbia > UPenn
And no, that’s not the inner ‘Columbia elitist’ within me talking. That’s a fact.
@Well Based on the imaginary code of semi-decipherable importance called “high school bathroom gossipability,” I would say you’re probably all right.
At my high school, when someone got into Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, it was talked about in bathrooms and hallways for at least several days with jealousy and awe. When someone got into Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth, or UPenn, it was talked about with condescension, as in, “so-and-so thinks he’s hot shit because he just got into UPenn, but everyone knows that’s barely even an Ivy.”
When anyone got into Columbia, however, there was no gossip whatsoever. As in it just. didn’t. register. No one cared.
Or maybe that was just my own personal high school un-gossipability (aka unpopularity).
On second thought, yeah, that was probably just me.
@... I have three midterms next week.
When is fall break?
@Again, something that could have been brought to my attention YESTERDAY!!!
@simply UNACCEPTABLE!