Shifting from Columbia Engineering to Columbia College

admissionsgeek
Sat, 13 Nov 2010 16:35:29 +0000

beard - i think you would agree for the following reasons the columbia system exists.

a) historic balkanization of the university discouraged easy flows.
b) the core and restrictions require students to be placed in different camps more fully than schools with vague requirements; a barrier must exist if you want students to finish in 4 years.
c) the disparity between cc to seas in terms of reputation led the former to not want the latter, and the latter to prefer the opportunity to formulate its own identity.

in fact today the biggest obstacle to undergraduate easy flow comes from SEAS and SEAS alumni that fear any kind of taking over by the college will 1) reduce funding to SEAS (ratios would be screwy), 2) destroy the SEAS identity that they have sought to build and the momentum the school has. at this point the college has gotten over the disparity divergence, and most consulting folks have advised that columbia be better branded if it had one ugrad school, however, politically it could be a death sentence to try to extract SEAS ugrads from SEAS without a bloody fight.

further: graduating with a degree in engineering doesn’t behold you to engineering. i think you don’t like the fact that grading is tougher at SEAS, and that is reasonable about your gripes, but in the end you’re graduating from one of the best universities in the world and there is a lot of currency there.

and a final note - columbia’s engineering offerings are far greater than all the schools you’ve mentioned. it can’t quite be compared to those schools - it is more comparable to Penn or Cornell, which do not allow easy flow.