Columbia or UPENN ?

red_amp_blue
Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:02:09 +0000

Interesting points, but I disagree with you on the “differences”

1 - Penn’s “preprofessional reputation” comes from having strong engineering, business and nursing programs. The College - however - is the center of ugrad life and is itself the same size as Columbia undergard (Fu and the College); so, notwithstanding the visibility of Wharton etc. a student won’t suffer re the balance of humanities + arts vs professional life at Penn.

BTW, the dirty little secret is that a huge majority of the lib arts kids want to work for Goldman Sachs or McKinsey at both schools LOL

2) no comment

3) true only in that you can’t compare NYC to ANY city in the US; NYC is larger than Boston, Philly, DC, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, and Dallas combined (you could throw in Cincinatti for good measure - NY is still larger); its more diverse than almost all other cities (though Philly is up there in the top 10 along with NYC)

4) Hmmm—where are your numbers from???
Undergrad - Penn is ~10,000 kids, Columbia is ~7000
Total - Penn is 21,000 students, Columbia is 23,000

Endowments - both are roughly $7 billion

5 - Way off dude. Penn has pulled in more research dollars than Columbia for each of the last 10 years, and recently by a large margin (ie., more than a $50 mm - 10% - difference).

Both schools allow their students to get involved in advanced research. Penn has the Center for Undergrad Research and Fellowships (CURF) just for this reason.

Your point re CU being more research oriented is completely and unequivocally wrong.

Penn does has more unique majors derived from its 30 year old focus on interdisciplinary work. Management and Technology (engineering and business) is 30 yrs old. Other crazy majors are Biological Basis of Behavior, Digital Media Design, Vagelos Progam (life sciences), etc. Penn also has a wider array of classes (Iranian Literature, Midwivery, Systems Analysis) simply b/c it’s a larger school and can support that range of programs.