Where do all of these non-traditional students with lots of money come from to fill Columbia’s School of General Studies, if the financial aid in the SGS division is worse than in the College division?
@ucbalumnus, Columbia GS does offer merit scholarships. Many also bring in transfer credits. A lot also take out loans. Many are adults.
And note that roughly half the student body at the private elites are full-pay. I daresay that all the Ivies/equivalents can fill their entire undergrad student body with full-payers if they wanted to (sacrificing on other metrics) so it doesn’t surprise me that Columbia GS can find enough full-payers to fill up.
Columbia GS also takes in a significant number of students who are military veterans and may have educational benefits from that source. See https://gs.columbia.edu/post-911-gi-bill-and-yellow-ribbon-program
I think it’s important to note that Columbia GS is not the only way that colleges take in undergrads without including them in statistical reporting for US News.
I’d also add that the presence of the GS students adds value for the traditional undergrads. When my daughter was an undergrad at Barnard, she told me that the GS students were very clearly the smartest in her classes, much quicker to grasp new concepts, etc. I’d attribute that to maturity & life experience, which count for a lot more than SAT scores. I’d also assume that GS students – for the most part adults who are paying their own way - are probably the most diligent about their studies, least likely to be partying outside of class hours.
Beyond programs for nontraditional students, many universities maintain some sort of secondary program where they funnel off lower stat applicants-- such as NYU’s “liberal studies” program; or Northeastern’s Specialized Entry (NUin).
According to this article, as of 2013, more than half of all colleges had some sort of alternative admissions track: http://time.com/money/collection-post/4229580/college-alternative-admissions-policies/
Also, I don’t know whether universities with multiple specialized undergraduate colleges are reporting data from all colleges or picking and choosing. Does Cornell include the land grant schools admission stats? Does NYU include Gallatin or Steinhardt or the BFA students at Tich, or its nursing school? Easy enough to rationalize carving out an exception for any group of undergrads who apply to any specialized program.
Let me rephrase, HY have not invested in engineering over the past few decades like others, but that is changing, and I do think that if you throw enough well spent money (and they have it) at something it will end up be something to behold. I was never attempting to say that they will overtake Stanford but come close, or on par with, you bet.
I’m an academic linguist and one of the Ivies (Penn, specifically) and Stanford have easily among the top graduate programs in linguistics in the nation—but so do a number of public institutions, both highly sought after on CC (Michigan, Ohio State) and less so (New Mexico, Hawai’i), so all this discussion of undergrad degrees leading to later success made me wonder about the undergraduate degrees for faculty at these programs—and linguistics is a pretty small field with relatively small programs, making this not terribly difficult to research. (Of course, a high-end graduate degree helps—but that’s not what we’re focusing on here, right?) Here’s what I found, counting only tenure-stream faculty actually in the core linguistics programs (as opposed to affiliated faculty from other departments, but including cross-appointments) at the six universities mentioned above, and not including professor emeriti even if they still teach or publish.
TL;DR: You want to be a professor in a high-status department? At least for linguistics, improve your chances by getting your undergrad degree from outside the United States!
Penn:
[ul][]Cambridge
[]Case Western
[]Harvard
[]Harvard
[]Harvard
[]Humboldt University Berlin
[]McGill
[]U of Kentucky
[]U of Nottingham
[] U of Rochester
[]York (Canada)
[]three I was utterly unable to find undergraduate information on
[]one I’m pretty sure received an undergrad degree from a Chinese university, but I was unable to determine exactly which one[/ul]
Stanford:
[ul][li]Australian National University[/li][]Berkeley
[]Brandeis
[]Cambridge
[]Cornell
[]Harvard
[]Harvard
[]MIT
[]NYU
[]Oberlin
[]SUNY Albany
[]U of Helsinki
[]U of Helsinki
[]U of Osnabrück[/ul]
**Michigan
[ul][]Carleton
[]Georg August University Göttingen,
[]Georgetown
[]Hampshire College
[]Harvard
[]Harvard
[]Indiana
[]Michigan
[]Michigan
[]Minnesota
[]North-West University (South Africa)
[]Sichuan Normal University
[]Stanford
[]U of Bordeaux
[]U of Brasilia
[]Vassar
[]one I couldn’t find undergrad information for[/ul]
Ohio State
[ul][]Chicago
[]Chicago
[]City College of New York
[]Duke
[]Facultés Notre-Dame de la Paix à Namur (Belgium)
[]Michigan
[]Purdue
[]U of London
[]U of Rochester
[]U of Stuttgart (Germany)
[]U of Washington
[]UNC Chapel Hill
[]Université Laval (Canada)
[]Yale
[]one who I think got an undergraduate degree from the Universiteit Leiden in the Netherlands, but I’m not completely certain
[]one whose undergraduate degree is, I’m pretty sure, from the U of Pune in India
[]two with no available undergrad degree information[/ul]
New Mexico
[ul][]Brown
[]Bryn Mawr
[]Cal State Sonoma
[]Chicago
[]New Mexico
[]New Mexico
[]Oberlin
[]Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Peru)
[]Wellesley
[]two with no undergrad degree information available[/ul]
Hawai’i
[ul][]Arizona State
[]Hawai’i
[]Michigan
[]U of Alaska Fairbanks
[]U of Edinburgh
[]U of Prince Edward Island
[]U of Sydney (Australia)
[]UC San Diego
[]UCLA
[]Washington U in St Louis
[*]one with no undergraduate degree information available[/ul]
@CU123, first, H&Y should try to reach Princeton’s level in engineering first, which they haven’t yet.
Re: #198-202
I attended a private university that has a school of continuing education, but as an undergraduate had virtually no interaction with students in that school. My loss, maybe. Columbia GS is more tightly integrated with Columbia College (and Barnard) but this seems to be a little unusual among similar programs at peer universities. Some of these programs long pre-date the US News rankings. IMO it’s debatable whether you’d get a truer representation of academic quality by including the stats of students in those programs, or, if you did, whether it would change the university’s ranking very much. Maybe in the case of Columbia GS you should; maybe that would bump Columbia out of its #5 tie down to #8 or something like that. Although, the GS students tend to come in with very different profiles than the Columbia College students, so I’m not sure it’s valid to represent their contributions in terms of test scores and HS class rank.
Why do we care about student stats, anyway?
There are several rather different reasons why we might; one is that they are a proxy for assessing the quality of the campus Meet Market. How likely are you to interact with smart, motivated students in class discussions or dorm room bull sessions? Does the presence of Columbia GLS students improve or reduce that likelihood? From what I’m hearing, on balance maybe they improve it, but in ways that the statistical profiles probably can’t capture. By the same token, your average state flagship may beat the Ivies hands down in terms of student diversity, whether we’re talking about race and ethnicity, income, age, or opinions. Most of the rankings (with the possible exception of Washington Monthly) don’t account for that. For some applicants, this kind of difference may matter more than the ranking margins of error attributable to “gaming”.
@tk21769, that’s why I prefer outcomes-based tiers (http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1893105-ivy-equivalents-ranking-based-on-alumni-outcomes-take-2-1-p1.html). Columbia gets bumped down to the #10-13 tier there among RU’s.
Overall, yes, not huge differences. Biggest differences are that Reed and Bryn Mawr and NCF get bumped up a lot, the top publics and Oberlin and Rice get bumped up some, Davidson and Vandy go down as well as the research U’s known mostly for their pre-meds/med schools (JHU & WashU).
That list seem about right and just corroborates the obvious though it doesn’t attempt to measure the very elite occupations where H/S/Y dominate.
“USNWR definitely wants to punish those who they catch “cheating”, this is a huge cash cow for USNWR and anything that takes away or otherwise damages the goods is not something USNWR wants.”
Perhaps they should start with Columbia?
@tk21769 – I think that many universities, particularly publics, have the equivalent of GS students on campus simply because of a larger influx of transfer students. Basically these are somewhat older students who took some sort of post high school gap – and many do have accumulated college credits from other sources. And the stats of transfer students aren’t counted in the US News rankings either … yet think how much of a factor that will be in any of the California publics?
Columbia has simply chosen a different channel for admissions for that group of students, which means that they don’t compete head to head with the younger students coming out of high school.
I think the US News rankings are pretty much a farce in any case. Obviously it would make a lot more sense to focus on academic offerings and outcomes rather than the profile of the incoming first year students.
“Columbia has simply chosen a different channel for admissions for that group of students, which means that they don’t compete head to head with the younger students coming out of high school.”
Approximately 1/3 of undergraduate students enrolled at Columbia are in GS. That’s a HUGE percentage of these types of students who supposedly are in the same classrooms as matriculated freshmen. I highly doubt any elite public would be filling their classrooms with that percentage amount of transfers. In any case, USNWR allows Columbia to manipulate their admission statistics and not suffer ratings consequences.
Your numbers are off. It’s more like 25%, under 20% if you count Barnard undergrads into the mix.
CC = 4500
SEAS = 1500
Barnard = 2600
GS = 2100 (including 22% part time)
I’d add that the GS students take core classes in separate sections than the youngsters at CC – so to the extent that school quality might be impacted by the SAT scores of fellow students in the core classes, CC undergrads don’t need to stress out.
The summation of the past 30 posts would be that the USNWR Rankings are somewhat arbitrary but generally accurate and there is an overall concensus that HSYP remain the gold standard of higher education in the world.
However, outcomes need to be considered in context of the incoming students (both frosh and transfer). If a college has stronger incoming students, it is likely to have higher retention and graduation rates, for example (note that USNWR does have a small percentage of the ranking as “graduation rate performance” relative to that expected based on incoming students, but it is less important than selectivity and raw graduation and retention rates).
Job and career outcomes also need to consider the choice of majors by the colleges’ students, as well as the strength of incoming students. The Economist’s college ranking is an attempt to adjust for these factors: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2015/10/29/our-first-ever-college-rankings . Of course, not everyone considers pay level in first job at graduation the only thing worth measuring for post-graduation outcomes.
California public universities aim to have 60% upper division and 40% lower division enrollment (based on statewide policies created long before there were USNWR rankings). For campuses with high retention and graduation rates (i.e. the more selective ones), that means that about a third of upper division students and eventual bachelor’s graduates entered as transfers (however, because frosh attend for more years each, about a fifth of overall undergraduate enrollment is from transfers). Common data sets of UCB and UCLA indicate that new students do appear to have a 2-to-1 ratio of frosh to transfers.
Yes that is correct and why the UC’s are so different from the elite private schools. Most of these transfer students are from CC and have SAT scores 300-400 points or more below the freshman admits and simply do not belong at any elite college. It is the way the UC’s get around the AA laws. All transfer GPA’s are considered exactly equal. So a 3.9 from a CC is superior to a 3.75 from a rigorous private school. For all practical purposes the is means it’s virtually impossible to transfer into the UC’s from any competitive college.
Well that doesn’t bode well for UC grads.
Why? Are you afraid of cooties?
@SAY & @CU123, well, those transfers to UCs end up earning higher GPAs at a UC than the students who started at a UC as a freshman, so they’re not exactly floundering.
And when you look at alumni achievements, Cal (and UMich and UVa, who also take in a good number of transfers) actually end up a little above where their USNews rankings have them while the reverse is true for Columbia.