To zzgirl

calmom
Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:50:52 +0000

Yes, Barnard is easier to get in (because only women apply) than CC & Seas



I would just point out that as a statistical matter, this would be a true statement as to collective admissions – but on an individual basis, “easier” would depend on circumstances. In fact, looking at raw statistics as to admission rates, you would have to conclude that SEAS is “easier” to get into than CC, as it has a higher percentage of admissions, but of course its applicant pool is considerably narrowed.

Individually, there are students at each of the schools for whom admission is extremely likely --such as recruited athletes – and other applicants who have virtually no chance of admission because they fall far short of the standards of the college. Barnard and Columbia have somewhat different admission standards, but Barnard does have a self-limiting applicant pool.

My daughter also applied to and was admitted to University of Chicago, which had a significantly higher statistical rate of admission than Barnard – but I would never claim that means that Chicago was “easier” to get into than Barnard.

There are a significant number of applicants who apply to Ivies simply because those schools are famous and prestigious, whether its Harvard, Yale, or Columbia. I have no idea of the percentage, but I would imagine the pool of applicants given serious consideration is significantly smaller once the clear rejects have been identified and pulled from the mix. On the other hand, schools like Chicago or Barnard tend to attract only students who have done more research in terms of targeting their applications, and have factors that may be off-putting for many. At Chicago, it is their “where fun comes to die” reputation – at Barnard it is the fact of being a women’s college as well as being far less well known. So Barnard by definition would start with a different quality of applicant pool.

So – on an individual basis – you really can’t draw any conclusions. It’s just a matter of correctly understanding statistics: if I flip a coin, my chances of coming up heads are 50%. If I flip it again, my chances on that toss are still 50%. Each time I flip the coin, my chances remain the same. But of course the chances of getting heads 10 times in a row are extremely slim. But the point is – the chances of the individual coin toss don’t diminish because of the statistics that apply to multiple coin tosses. And you cannot draw a conclusion about “easier” or “harder” to get into without consideration of all the factors.

All of the colleges under the Columbia umbrella have qualitatively very high standards of admission as compared to other colleges – Barnard is the most selective (statistically) of all the womens colleges, though arguably Wellesley might be “harder” to get into, but again: it’s got a self-selecting applicant pool. But the point is: the end result is not “easy” to get into any of the schools.

I think that this becomes apparent to any student once they are on campus and taking classes with students from the other schools. My daughter’s experience was that the very smartest students she met were GS students, and I think the GS admission rate is close to 50%. But I assumed all along that came in part from maturity. A 26 year old simply has a fully matured prefrontal cortex and 8 more years of life-experience than an 18 year old, and it probably is reflected in the way they approach their studies. (My daughter had reported that the GS students seemed to “get” new concepts quicker than all the others).

So the bottom line is that the academic expectations are equivalent throughout – and all of the schools do their best to make sure they are selecting students who are capable of meeting those expectations. After the first semester grades are issued, the deck has been reshuffled. (In other words, when my daughter enrolled in a Columbia course her first semester and got an A-, she clearly had done better than all of the Columbia students who got B’s and C’s, but not as well as those who got A’s.)