Lafayette College vs. NYU

Boondocks
Fri, 30 Mar 2012 23:58:05 +0000

First off, I’m not affiliated with Lafayette - I graduated from Princeton 30 years ago. At present, I recruit senior executives for companies for a living.

Lafayette and NYU both grant degrees, but other than that, they are much different schools. NYU is a large and very urban university. You would be in the the most expensive, exciting, scary and cramped city in the country. NYU will have many large classes and many grad students teaching. The advantage is that they wil have more famous/renowned professors than will Lafayette; you may not have the access that you think you’re going to get to them, however. A lot of big name professors don’t want to deal with undergraduates. You’ll probably get a fantastic education there, although you’ll have to make sure that you won’t get lost in the morass.

Lafayette is an excellent college. The classes are small and there are no grad students who speak with a heavy Chinese accent teaching freshman calculus. It’s small, and you know what the location is like, because you’ve grown up there.

Both schools have graduates who are very successful in countless fields, including things like international business.

As for choosing NYU because it is way ahead when it comes to globalization, you’re getting way ahead of yourself. Although I’m sure it seems now like you are absolutely going to have a career where studying that is going to be crucial, being 30 years out of college and having seen the career paths of tens of thousands of people, I will predict that 15 years from now, you will be doing nothing like what you’re planning now. I can think of religion majors who are orthopedic surgeons and engineers who are wall street tycoons and history majors who are medical devices executives and a religion major who runs an insurance company and an international affairs major who runs the Dallas Mavericks (all college roommates/classmates, by the way). I’m not sure if being a history major is good preparation for becoming a supreme court justice, but that’s what another classmate did. If you’re seeing a pattern emerge that indicates that there is no pattern, that’s what I’m trying to point out. This is not atypical at all, and most of these people went to college not realizing that they would graduate with the major that they ultimately chose. And then they wound up in a career that was unrelated to their major.

Plus, I’m not sure that NYU will put you way ahead when it comes to globalization, especially since no one can teach globalization very well in the classroom (best way to learn it is by being global, which you can do with a semester aboard, which you should be able to do from either school). Besides, I know a Lafayette grad I grew up with who is too busy making trips to China from California (and sick of them) to worry about how great globalization is.

Lafayette can teach you what you want. So can NYU, although I’m prejudiced against giant universities where the emphasis is not on the undergraduate.

Pick the school where you personally fit in best. I’m concerned that you think you won’t fit in at NYU, but may go there. That’s a real warning sign to me.

I can’t say if Lafayette is the right place for you, either - you may want to venture away from home. But don’t pick a college because of a major that you probably won’t stick with, anyways - most kids change their majors before they graduate anyway.

I would choose Lafayette if you want to stay close to home and want a personal, small college, small town education. I would choose NYU if you want to experience the big city.

PS: I wouldn’t build your plans around transferring to Penn or Harvard. Those schools are both extremely difficult to transfer into (and both are far closer to an NYU atmosphere than a Lafayette atmosphere, so if you’ll be unhappy at NYU, you could very well be unhappy at one of those schools).

PSS: Most kids wind up liking the school they pick. Spend a weekend at NYU and stay overnight at Lafayette, even if you are not going to be living there, just to get a better feel of both places.