<p>Whats your opinion? My friends and I have this discussion allllll the time…since we all like different schools! So…which will it be!!!</p>
<p>columbia. 10 char</p>
<p>The question is which is better for the individual student. </p>
<p>Beyond that, the argument is stupid and pointless. They are all great schools.</p>
<p>You need to get new friends.</p>
<p>It’s a three way tie.</p>
<p>None of them would meet my kid’s needs, and she’d likely hate all three of them. Can I vote “none of the above”?</p>
<p>Cornell (10 char)</p>
<p>I agree with the “for whom” posters. Apples and oranges and sweet corn.</p>
<p>You have this discussion with your friends on a regular basis? Jesus dude, get a life. It’s college for christ’s sake. It’s not the end of the world if you decide to go to one over another.</p>
<p>My daughter is at Cornell. Columbia was her first choice and it didn’t work out. She never considered Penn. She thought Columbia would be better for her because of the location and opportunity for internship. Now that she is at Cornell, she loves it and couldn’t imagine to be anywhere else. </p>
<p>Cornell has many different schools (Engineering, ILR, Hotel, A&S, etc), therefore she gets to meet many different types of people. Cornell kids are also more down to earth. They play hard and study hard. As a parent, I worry less with her being up at Ithaca. She feels very safe on campus, so I don’t call her up to check up on her. I think if she was at Columbia, I would worry a lot more (it’s a personal thing). I also think that she will be living in a major city when she graduates, so this could be the only opportunity she would get to live in a country.</p>
<p>As far as internship opportunity, as a first year student majoring in math and econ, she applied for summer internship at Bear, GS and JP through Cornell’s career center. She was surprised to be contacted by few of them for the first round as a freshman. What she doesn’t have as much opportunity to do is internship during school year. But I would prefer for her to focus on her school work and her friends anyway. Cornell has a lot of school spirit (maybe because of its isolation, kids stay on campus). </p>
<p>I don’t usually like to post on the comparison thread because it tends to get heated. All of those schools are great schools. It is really a personal choice and most of the time is which one you could get in. Cornell is turning out to be perfect for my daughter (a little bit of heaven on earth, according to her), but I think she probably would have been happy anywhere.</p>
<p>My daughter is also at Cornell. </p>
<p>She fell in love with Columbia when she visited, and for a while it was her first choice, but she eventually decided against it because she considered the core curriculum too restrictive and too literature-oriented, especially after having come from a similarly restrictive, similarly literature-oriented IB program. She wanted more freedom to pursue her own interests (which have nothing whatsoever to do with literature), and Cornell offered that. In fact, after considering a lot of schools, she decided that Cornell offered more of what she wanted than any other college did. She applied and was accepted Early Decision, and she has never regretted that choice.</p>
<p>Penn was on her radar screen for a while, but her father was highly critical of its rather downscale urban location, and she was not sufficiently enamored of the school to bother having the necessary confrontation with her dad.</p>
<p>There are definitely fewer during-the-year internship opportunities at Cornell than at an urban school, but my daughter has applied for or is in the process of applying for more than a dozen internships for the summer, almost all of which she identified through Cornell’s career service’s resources. She has already been interviewed for one and has been contacted to arrange an interview with another, even though she is a freshman (majoring in economics, probably with a second major in government).</p>
<p>One other nice thing about Cornell is that my daughter has been welcomed – and I mean really welcomed – into its instrumental performing ensembles, even though she is not a music major and will probably never take a music course. For students like her, who love music but don’t intend to devote their lives to it, Cornell is a great choice because the music major is very small, and the university truly needs kids from other departments to fill out their performing groups.</p>
<p>And on top of all that, freshman can get single rooms. Easily. My daughter loves hers, which is larger and nicer than her room at home (and she regrets that she will probably never live in such a nice dorm again).</p>
<p>Like oldfort, I don’t worry about my daughter’s safety at Cornell, although I do worry about it when she has to come home or go back to campus during winter weather. Last week, she had to travel seven hours by charter bus to get back to campus on the one day in the last four weeks when it snowed. If she had been at Columbia or Penn (or Brown, for that matter, which was also a school she seriously considered), she would have been traveling by train, which seems safer to me, and she would have had more choices about when to travel, instead of being tied to a charter bus schedule. (Yes, there are alternative ways of getting from the Washington, DC area to Ithaca, but they take much longer, cost more, and require at least one – usually two – transfers from one form of transit to another. The charter bus is clearly the best alternative.)</p>
<p>Wow! thanks oldfort and Marian!</p>
<p>Whichever one you can get into that will get you the most scholarships, aid, grants, or any other money so you aren’t in debt for 10-15 years after you graduate. Remember; college is suppose to make you “SMARTER”. It’s not smart to put you or your parents into debt for $200,000 unless you can guarantee one hell of a starting salary to pay pay that cost. Of course; some will rationalize and say that getting the college experience and education from a top ranked school is “PRICELESS”. Well, they are wrong. There is a very real price tag attached to these schools.</p>
<p>FWIW; it doesn’t HAVE to cost you $200,000 to go to these schools. There is a lot more money out there than just merit money from the particular school. There are a lot of private scholarships available if you look. I’ve had friends who’s kids; that I know personally; have gone to MIT, Stanford, Princeton. and George Washington university. I know for a fact, that after the dust settled and all the scholarships, aid, grants, etc… were used, that the highest amount any of these kids have had to pay to go to school; including dorms and food was about $12-$15,000 a year. We are friends and talk openly about finances. Now, paying back, or your parents paying back $40-$60,000 for college is a much smarter scenario; unless finances aren’t in issue in your family; e.g. Clinton, Bush, Kerry, Forbes, etc… So the BEST is the one that isn’t going to bankrupt you. So, you tell us, which one is the BEST?</p>
<p>Hard choice. I’m not a fan of the core curriculum so that’s a negative for Columbia, but I loved the time I lived in NYC (grad school at Columbia.) Cornell is too much in the boonies for me, but I might enjoy it for four years. I like Philadelphia, but I’ve heard a fair amount of grumbling about the safety of the neighborhood on CC. If it were me, I’d decide based on which school was likely to be most interesting for the majors I was considering. Probably an edge to Columbia for location.</p>
<p>Will someone please close the door. Its getting drafty.</p>