Columbia and Uchicago

sac
Sun, 27 May 2007 17:21:32 +0000

tk89 – ouch! I’m dying of curiosity to know what department you TA’d for. I laughed aloud at your comparison of the Columbia bureaucracy to the NYC department of motor vehicles. I already mentioned the spotty advising. But I do disagree with your description of Columbia students as anti-intellectual. If they are anti-intellectual and pre-professional, wonder how they’d stand on that scale with students who go to NYU, Northwestern, Penn, Stanford, or for that matter, those who choose Harvard for its pedigree on their resumes… I suggest as a hypothesis that during the time between your undergrad at U of C and your graduate studies at Columbia, perhaps a whole generation of students responded to the admissions pressure and the changing economy by becoming more grade conscious, more competitive, and pre-professional – and the undergraduate liberal arts experience became less valued as a time to find yourself intellectually rather than a means to an end. Some evidence might be the huge increase in enrollments all over the country in economics departments, which students see as the route to business and finance. I do think that NYC and the financial lure of Wall Street, which recruits heavily at Columbia, has had an impact on campus. But I think it’s had an impact virtually everywhere – just look at the threads about Investment Banking on this forum. (Some of which ask how Chicago does in that regard:) Quite well, I understand.)

My kid chose Columbia because of its core curriculum, among other reasons including the NYC music scene, and really has enjoyed it. He’s quantitative, and so has gone through his phase of being tempted by finance as his friends have lined up lucrative summer internships. But he’s probably headed at this point to a PhD program. Funny, but his closest friends at Columbia happen to almost all be the offspring of academics. If they’re anti-intellectual, we’ll have to invent a new word to describe Rush Limbaugh.

That said, I would have been delighted if my S had chosen U of C. I can honestly report that it had the only campus cafe we visited where the students next to us were discussing Wittgenstein.