Princeton too isolated and subarban-y?

PennCAS2014
Tue, 15 Sep 2015 14:32:29 +0000

As a graduate of Penn, I can assure you that the education is in no way inferior to those of our friends at any other Ivies. Student and faculty interaction is outstanding at Penn. A much higher percentage of faculty are full time teachers at Penn than at most other top schools which is a driving force behind the close bonds students form with their professors and advisors (http://college.usatoday.com/2015/09/08/best-us-college-2016-yale-penn/). The low student to faculty ratio of 6:1 also helps to facilitate close faculty-student relationships. At any university, some classes will be better than others. And of course if you look at a university at the department level, some may have moderately stronger departments than others depending on faculty and department structure. Though, on the whole, undergraduate educations at the top schools tend to be pretty similar.

Wharton definitely doesn’t 'take up a lot of the oxygen at Penn. From the outside, many who were never students at Penn might be under the false impression that Wharton has a disproportionate influence on the university, but that’s not what the average student experience is like at all (there are exceptions to every rule, of course). The rest of us had plenty of oxygen to enjoy, and then some Since we all live together in the College Houses, eat together in the dining halls, socialize together, share the same career services/recruitment opportunities, join the same clubs/extracurriculars, and take classes together (the one university policy ensures that Penn undergrads can take classes in any of Penn’s 4 undergraduate schools and many graduate and professional schools, regardless of their homeschools), most students pay little attention to which undergrad school is their homeschool. Also, as a side note, no one at Penn can be a student who wanted to go to Wharton but didn’t get in because you only apply to one of Penn’s four undergraduate schools. If you aren’t admitted to that school, you don’t get to attend a ‘second choice’ within the university. So no one is in the College because they didn’t get into Wharton- it was just a choice that each student made about where his or her intellectual interests would be best served.

A substantial portion of Penn students do live ‘off campus’ but most of them will choose to live in the beautiful Victorian homes just a block or two from campus. Penn’s beautiful, contiguous, 300 acre campus keeps students constantly engaged around a central and compact roughly 12 block urban oasis on which most students will spend the majority of their time, in class and at clubs. It rarely feels like you are in a major city when you’re on campus and yet you have access to America’s fifth largest city only a short walk from the heart of College Green.

The Ivies do differ in social life, however. It’s not that one has a better social life than another, it’s that they are all distinct from one another. My best friend went to Princeton and she wasn’t to pleased with the eating clubs or lack of night life options in suburban New Jersey. She also felt ‘bickering’ was a little demeaning- though it paid off for her as she did get the club she wanted! She did love Princeton’s quiet atmosphere and the somewhat bucolic feel it can engender depending on where you are on campus. The place is like a perfectly manicured garden, no doubt about it. It all depends on what you’re looking for.

And at the end of the day, graduates of both universities go on to pretty similar careers and grad schools. Looking at the post graduate stats from only Penn’s College of Arts and Sciences and comparing them to Princeton’s (so a roughly equal sample size studying largely similar subjects) you can see that the schools have nearly identical outcomes. (http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/files/2013CASFinalReport.pdf) (https://careerservices.princeton.edu/sites/career/files/Annual%20Report%202012-2013_FINAL_0.pdf). It’s not a perfect comparison because a lot of Penn’s STEM students obviously self select into the Engineering school and many kids interested in Wall Street self select into Wharton, though it’s a pretty solid comparison on the whole.

Top Grad Schools-
For Penn grads: For Princeton grads:
Harvard (9) Harvard (12)
NYU (11) NYU (7)
Princeton (5) Princeton (12)
Penn (43) Penn (5)
Stanford (5) Stanford (14)
Columbia (25) Columbia (not listed)
MIT (not listed) MIT (9)
Oxford (3) Oxford (6)
Cambridge (6) Cambridge (6)

Top Areas of Employment:
For Penn Grads (60% employed full time): For Princeton Grads (50.3% employed full time):
Financial Services (18%) Financial Services (12.2%)
Education (14%) Education (3.6)
Technology + (8%) Professional Scientific and Technology services (12.3%)
Government (3%) Public Administration (0.6%)
Manufacturing (2%) Manufacturing (1.8%)

Just some more food for thought. College is really what you make of it. If you don’t take advantage of what’s afforded to you, it’s easy to miss out anywhere. Go where you’ll be happy.