1960 costs of attendance and SAT scores for some colleges in Life magazine

Parents Forum
21

Best line (about Columbia): “Location in New York has little appeal to most students.”

That was also true 25 years later in the mid 1980’s when I was applying colleges. None of the top students at my public HS (on Long Island) wanted to go to Columbia, and the main reason was its location. I had a good friend (who did a 3/2 engineering degree with a SUNY school and Columbia) who was held up at gunpoint just off campus in the late 80s. Of course things are much different now and Columbia’s location is an asset.

22

Re: #20

1960 was generally regarded as being before the crime wave, although Columbia University’s proximity to neighborhoods with black people may have been seen as a negative by many in that more racist era.

The mid-1980s, however, was during the crime wave (note that the Escape from New York movie about New York’s reputation for crime was made in 1981).