<p>A high school senior, I have been accepted to the four universities listed in the title. An aspiring professor of Latin and Greek, I would like to attend the university with the best academic reputation, specifically in the field of Classics. Would anyone care to offer suggestions regarding which of the four schools I should attend? I’d like to add that I’m not a huge fan of general education or core requirements.</p>
<p>Ironically the two best options for Classics are all about the “core” Columbia and Chicago - I would opt for either.</p>
<p>Columbia…</p>
<p>All four have superb classics departments. I would choose based on fit, unless you’re interested in classical archaeology, in which case Penn would certainly be the best option. (Cornell would be a distant second, with Chicago and Columbia far behind either.) Cornell is the best of the bunch for Indo-European linguistics, if that’s your cup of tea. </p>
<p>If you decide to branch out into other ancient languages, Chicago has by far the best offerings. Penn and Cornell are more limited but still quite good. Columbia’s offerings are extremely sparse.</p>
<p>If you’re not a fan of core requirements, Chicago and Columbia are probably not the best choices.</p>
<p>In the NRC Rankings of Classics Programs ([NRC</a> Rankings in Classics](<a href=“http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~jnewton/nrc_rankings/area2.html]NRC”>NRC Rankings in Classics)), we have:</p>
<ol>
<li>Chicago (#7)</li>
<li>Columbia (#10)</li>
<li>Penn (#13)</li>
<li>Cornell (Unlisted)</li>
</ol>
<p>I think Chicago, Columbia, and Penn would be your best options here. Cornell really isn’t known as a Classics school…</p>
<p>I think it comes down to Columbia and Chicago. You’ll find great things at each in terms of what you’re going into so I think it comes down to other factors (ie. location, student body etc etc)</p>
<p>
I strongly disagree. (Cornell is #12, not unlisted, in that ranking, by the way.) Cornell has done extensive hiring since the last NRC rankings. Since the new ones as well, for that matter. Sturt Manning is an already famous but rising star in the field, and Caitlin Barrett and Chris Monroe are establishing names for themselves as well. Michael Weiss, who had only just finished his PhD during the last NRC ranking, is one of THE biggest names in IE studies. On the Near Eastern side of things, you have a few more promising hires and the purchasing of a huge collection of cuneiform tablets that leaves it outstripped only by Yale, Penn, and (maybe) the OI at Chicago. Like Brown, Cornell is one of very few universities that is actively expanding its ancient studies departments…I think it’s a very promising place to be.</p>
<p>At least you didn’t cite the new NRC rankings. They are even more skewed than the old ones, at least according to how I view programs. Poor Cornell especially got the shaft, as it was caught after its senior professors retired but before it hired its new batch. </p>
<p>One thing I forgot to mention earlier is that Penn students can cross-register at Bryn Mawr. While this is probably not of much interest to most undergraduates, it is a huge perk for a classicist - Bryn Mawr has an old and famous classics program that easily holds its own against those at the most prestigious universities. With Penn, it’s one of the more formidable classics duos, along with Duke-UNC and Columbia-NYU-CUNY. (Although Stanford and Berkeley have superb classics programs, as do the Boston colleges to a lesser extent, they are not nearly so closely interconnected.)</p>
<p>Is there any significant difference in quality between Chicago’s department and Columbia’s? Also, my primary interest is the Latin and Greek languages and literatures themselves, particularly within the late-antique and medieval context.</p>
<p>Classical or Archaic Greek prose or poetry?
Republican or Empire prose or poetry?</p>
<p>I’ve grown to love Latin literature of the Late Republic, Early Principate, so Columbia (Zetzel [Cicero], Williams [Ovid], Volk [Survey]), Chicago (Asmis [Cicero], Hall [Cicero]), or Cornell (Ahl [Ovid], Mankin [Cicero]) for me, considering departmental strength and reputation, as well institutional strength and reputation.</p>
<p>You’ve had limited exposure to books and articles, but the faculty of these universities list their specializations on their profiles, yes?</p>
<p>Ultimately, all four of these schools are peers, academically and “reputationally” speaking.</p>
<p>I’ve looked at the department course listings and faculty pages of all these schools, but ultimately such online information can only tell one so much, so I thought I’d ask about other people’s experiences.</p>
<p>Given that the OP said that “I’m not a huge fan of general education or core requirements,” it seems that Columbia and Chicago–both with required core curricula–should be further down on the list. But I agree with some of the above posters that this really should be a matter of personal preference and fit for the OP based on the entire undergraduate experience at these 4 schools. The Classics departments of all 4 are so closely and highly ranked, and the overall academic reputations of these schools are so comparable, that those factors really aren’t dispositive.</p>
<p>A Classics major can’t go wrong with any of these schools, so go with that “feels” right and where you think you’d be happiest based on the totality of the school and campus.</p>