Columbia vs Duke

confidentialcoll
Tue, 15 Jun 2010 00:23:25 +0000

but also is rather expensive even if you get a generous loan. Duke on the other hand may not offer as many opportunities, but does seem like more of a friendly, fun-loving, and enjoyable place to be. What do you think?



Unless you blow up a lot of money on entertainment at the more expensive end of the spectrum in NYC how is Columbia rather expensive compared to Duke? Columbia’s FA is excellent, probably a little better than Duke’s.

The social scenes are very different and I definitely think its different strokes for different folks. I would have disliked to be at Duke where college life revolves around athletics and frats, because I was neither an athlete nor a frat guy, and I would have hated to be treated as secondary to frat bros and athletes. I still wanted a college experience of going to parties, relaxing on campus lawns, randomly meeting up with friends in the middle of the night, screaming at sports games and Columbia offered all those, I look back at my 4 years with a lot of pride and contentment. One way to gauge how much people like / fit in on campus is the freshman retention rate, at Columbia 99% return, and at duke 97% return. What you can say from that is people are generally content with Columbia even if we’re regularly criticizing it and holding it to a high standard. Both colleges have very low suicide rates which is another measure of student contentment.

Finally you do not have to love the idea of a core curriculum to come to Columbia there are dozens of other reasons, but you definitely should not hate the idea.