21 CommentsFour (or more) years of Columbia tuition certainly isn’t cheap, and you’re not alone if you find yourself occasionally wondering if your time here is really worth it. “What’s the use?” you ask. “I’ll just graduate, pester my friends/family/craigslist until one of them hooks me up with a job, and my diploma will simply hang on a wall for the rest of my life.” If this conundrum has you fervently wishing that you didn’t have to spend the price of a Mercedes roadster for a piece of paper with the signature of some CEO-looking fellow on it, well, your prayers have been answered. For at least one of you. Because right now, on eBay, you can purchase a Columbia diploma for a mere $195!
Sure, it’s from 1955, and sure, your name probably isn’t Herbert Adler, but who looks that close? Just hang it up next to a bunch of pictures of your family and no one will think twice about it (reading fine print is so 1999). But you better act fast, because it looks like there’s only one!
Makes a great holiday gift!
Thanks to TT for the tip
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21 Comments
@Anonymous six seasons and a movie!!!!!
@Anonymous He probably needs the money because he’s still paying off student loans.
@Blah No Latin; no deal
@Anonymous this is so bizzare
@Jeff Winger It doesn’t work, guys…
@Senor Chang You should’ve told me too.
@Anonymous SIX SEASONS AND A MOVIE :(
@Anonymous So for an extra 195 I can get a Master’s degree too?
@lol this would suit a GS student.
@Challenge Accepted Bought it.
@... not all of us. some of us consider our affiliation with an elitist institution like columbia an embarrassing mistake and plan to quietly sweep under the rug the fact that we ever shared anything at all with the likes of numerous stuck up cc/seas undergrads such as yourself.
perhaps that’s a plus to having built a successful career before coming here. i know i’m not dependent on any columbia credential to be successful so i’m not at all forced to be enamored with the brand or drink the kool-aid. it’s really disappointing that i ended up at an institution that i have little respect for and zero pride in having attended, but sometimes life can throw curve balls. at the end of the day, i’m here with specific learning objectives which are being fulfilled, then any affiliation with this place will be nothing but a distant memory and a cause for additional critical attention when writing feedback on candidates.
@now, now hold up a minute, sir/madame/gender neutral addressee–if you didn’t care about the credential, you wouldn’t have come here. there are plenty of great, small programs and colleges that aren’t super famous. also, if you are so deeply unhappy and disgusted, perhaps transferring would be a good choice? i don’t mean this antagonistically at all–if you were successful in your career before coming here, i’m assuming you have a small savings at least. why not go where you can be happy or feel proud?
@GS Some of us? I’d say most of us. You’re right – plenty of the top 50 or 100 colleges, not to mention our state schools, would kick down doors to get GS students. Columbia knows this, and what’s more, knows that they can utterly shortchange us (down to status insults like dorm access and latin degrees, or major structural discrimination like giving us separate, underfunded counseling and financial aid departments) while still taking us in droves. In the real world, our degrees are still from Columbia. That’s not an opportunity that a smart person without a degree could ever turn down despite stiff competition from great lower-profile schools, and even though without that name our college experience is utterly worthless. Columbia’s ranking is more of a trap than a lure for deserving GS students. USNWR et al. doesn’t take GS into consideration. Neither, it seems, do the Board of Trustees.
@... did have a small savings. columbia took good care of that problem. i found the problem with transferring to be threefold: a) pretty much nobody in the world gives two shits about “masterpieces of western music” except for columbia, b) i no longer have residency in my home state, which means i would be set back years / thousands c) by the time i was fed up enough, it was already too late.
furthermore, didn’t care about the credential != don’t care about the credential. as my perception of what it represents has evolved, my respect for it has gone to zero.
and with respect to dr. dash’s treatsie on excellence below, allow me to clarify my position for you: the pursuit of excellence is, well, excellent… but i don’t really understand what that has to do with uncle lee’s finishing school.
i showed up here because i falsely believed that this place had more to offer. the reality i came to know was that at the undergraduate level, the difference between decent and “excellent” is vanishingly small, until you take into account the environment… whereby “excellent” is code for utter shit.
@Anonymous I guess there’s nothing you can do but shut up, get the fuck off bwog, fulfill grad requirements as quick as possible so you can leave this school earlier right? It’s one thing to be angry about certain aspects of the school like housing, administration, etc, but it’s another thing to bitch about the “elitist” nature of a school that by virtue of being an Ivy League school has had such a title since time immemorial. I doubt you are the first batch of people to be disillusioned by your experience here, and had you done your due diligence in researching the institute, maybe you would’ve been aware of these problems.
Long story short, you made the decision to come here, so deal with it. Denigrating the school isn’t going to make your time here any better. You signed for it. Also, there will always be people making fun of GS because it doesn’t fall within the “traditional” view of what most college students think of “college”.
@... when large sums of money find their way into the political system, we call it corruption.
when large sums of money find their way into academia, we call it prestige.
@Anonymous Fuck off. People like you give GS a bad name. Don’t like going here? Don’t go here.
@hmmm I believe that you conflate elitism of merit with elitism of baseless rank. I don’t at all object to your suggestion that there is room for improvement– this place is in many ways painfully short of perfection. At times you might even call it seriously inadequate. Nor do I disagree that there are people, especially people of a certain adolescent mentality, who savor the esteem the institution has acquired without valuing what has earned it– the things without which it really wouldn’t have any value at all. But in attacking the “elitism” I would argue that you almost lose sight of that as well, if the pursuit of excellence is among the things you sneer at. Because while in the end the ranking may be an overused currency– a shiny trophy on the mantle admired by passing fools for its sheen– the excellence that it represents has merit, if it is there. The question of whether it is– and I would argue that it is– is the important one. But if you don’t value that in itself, you can’t really criticize its absence.
@Anonymous Baselessly deriding an entire undergraduate college of Columbia University with a decidely unfunny “joke,” stay classy CC.
We’ll who’s degree is worth more in the real world: My 3.94 summa cum laude GS degree or yours.
@Something is missing here ….our real enemy here is barnard.
@sigh it’s “whose”, summa cum laude.