A message with statistics, or why I don't like flamers

admissionsgeek
Wed, 14 Jul 2010 18:37:14 +0000

There is a poster on here loves numbers and he likes to find proof in numbers. He doesn’t like fancy rhetoric, so he has decided a priori to disagree with folks because he feels like it.

So a bit about me: I love Columbia, I think it is fantastic, I don’t think there is a single thing I can point to that isn’t experiential, and in the end my feeling toward Columbia could very much have been replaced with another place had I been lucky enough to attend another school. But I have attended good schools in high school and now after, and I am partial to Columbia because of the intangibles, the rather quirky nature it has being as intellectual as it is, and yet forced to be as practical as it is, for the fact that the university is a juggarnaut with many different heads, and yet when you live on campus you can feel so detached from the world and forget you’re in NYC. It is what makes it unique, sure there schools that can portend to have the same, but they approximate the environment and do not reflect it exactly. UPENN is an 7/10 in trying to be an urban university that is also exceedingly relevant in the city. Sure it is good, but it isn’t the same. NYU itself lacks the policy relevance even by comparison to Columbia, but when it comes to having the academic cloistered nature it too lacks it, perhaps on an arbitrary scale a 5/10. But here is one man’s opinion.

To be THAT guy for a post, here are raw facts, uninterpreted (as if facts could be uninterpreted) and for your pleasure:

Student Body
Number of Undergraduates in CC/SEAS: 5667
Number of states represented: 50
Number of countries represented: 150 (schoolwide)
Percentage of first-generation college: 17%
Percentage of Students on Financial Aid: 53%
Percentage of Pell Grant Recipients: 15% (Highest of Private Top Rated Universities)
Percentage of students of color: 52% (Highest among the Ivy League)
Percentage of international students/students educated abroad: 17% (Highest among the Ivy League)

Academics
Unique Institutions: Core Curriculum, the progenitor of the modern distribution requirement system of higher education
Number of schools: 18 with 3 affiliates
Number of Academic Majors: 100 (not rounded either!)
Number of Departments: 38
Percentage of Classes under 20%: 77.2%
Number of faculty: 3566
Number of international faculty, researchers and visiting scholars: 1,991
Number of Research Centers: 214
Number of Current Nobel Prize Affiliates on Faculty: 9
Number of Nobel Prize Winners: 79
Number of Faculty part of AAAS: 148
Number of New Faculty Inventions per year: ~300 ([Facts + Stats | Columbia Technology Ventures](http://techventures.columbia.edu/about/facts+stats))
Size of Academic Library: 10,296,816 (6th Largest in the United States)
Annual Operating Budget: 2.66 Billion$

Campus
Size: 36 Acres
Percentage of Students who live on campus: 95%
Percentage of Students who live within 10 min of the center of campus: 95%
Number of student clubs: 352 registered with CU, 500 total with Barnard and subgroups of larger entities such as Hillel
Number of Division 1 Athletic Teams: 31

New York City
Total Visitors to NYC: 45.6 million
Population: 8,214,426 (Manhattan: 1,611,581)
Percentage Foreign Born: 36%
Number of Languages Spoken: NYC conservatively estimates 170.
Number of Primary Play and Musical Theaters: 47
Number of “Off-Broadway” Theaters: 100+
Number of Concert Halls and Sports Arenas: 66 (soon 67)
Number of Major League Sports Teams (4 majors): 4 in city limits, 9 within 15 miles.
Location shoots: 40,000 annually (including commercials, feature films, television shows and series, music videos, documentaries, etc.)
Feature films: over 250 a year
Television shows: 100+
Number of routes: 26
Subway cars (2009): 6,400
Subway stations: 468
Average weekday riders (2009): 5.1 million
Yearly riders (2009): 1.58 billion
Miles of track: 835
Subway Cost: $2.25
Eating establishments: 18,696
Number of Street Vendors Registered: 10,000+
Further signifcance: Home to the United Nations
Violent Crime: 58/10k

I’d interpret this as being in a place with A LOT of opportunities. Sure folks have others, but raw figures, Columbia has more at every level. I’d further interpret that the fact that such dualities exist in such extremities is at a level not similar to Columbia’s peers. I’d then turn to the stats that showcase the rather intimate nature of the school. The fact of the matter is that almost everyone will be at a ready distance from you in campus, and yet your classes will be small, it is rather illustrative of what occurs when you have such an extreme statistics that you are able to list off. Sure you could live in a small campus in Haverford with 1000 friends, but what if your campus is smaller than Haverford’s and has 5 times the people? It means the density of experience is that much more pronounced.

Few question just how diverse Columbia is, but when you add that diversity to the small quarters it makes it create (anecdotal here) a different dimension. It also says something about the place that folks from that diverse a background select Columbia. Example is that though many black students are admitted to Cornell each year, two years ago only 2% of the entering class chose to matriculate. The density of the experience, coupled with the fact that you will be able to be in small classes, coupled with the fact that you can get on the largest subway system in the country and go anywhere is unique. To say it is not, to say that you could approximate this at other places is not only naive, but a lie.

There are numbers that in their composite make up what I enjoy about Columbia, though few facts can sort of explain what it feels like to walk on riverside drive and look out at the Hudson, or to walk through Columbia’s gates and feel awe-inspired, it is the intangibles of the space, the architecture and the location that are remarkable. This poster was right, you become arrogant living in New York, and I don’t think it is a bad thing. You become arrogant in the sense that you know you’re living an experience that any 18 year old could dream about intellectually and socially. You know what you’re experiencing is not equaled by Penn, Yale, Harvard or the rest of that hat. They have something great, you have something special.