Yale vs. Columbia

gibby
Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:04:07 +0000

“Which college is better?”

There is no such thing. Yale is not better than Columbia or vice-versa. The schools are very different; some students might like one school more than than another, but there is no such thing as “better.”

Both Yale and Columbia offer a Liberal Arts Education to all students. Each school takes a different approach. At Columbia, every student, regardless of major MUST take the same basic set of “core” courses during their freshman and sophomore years, which include:


Contemporary Civilization
Literature Humanities
University Writing
Art Humanities
Music Humanities
Frontiers of Science


Columbia prides itself on it’s core-curriculum, which gives every student from the 1930’s to present-day the same commonality. For some students though, it’s very much like high school – you must taking those specific courses; there is no deviation. For more info, see: [The Core Curriculum](The Core Curriculum)

Yale’s Liberal Arts requirements are met by selecting courses from a broad range of electives that include writing, quantitative reasoning, foreign language, humanities and arts, sciences and social sciences. Unlike Columbia, Yale does not dictate which courses a student must take. Students that like Yale’s approach generally hate Columbia, and those students that love Columbia, tend to not like Yale, as it gives them too many choices. See: [Distributional Requirements by Year | Yale College](http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/distributional-requirements-year)

It’s an individual choice – one that can best be made by re-visiting the schools and asking questions of each administration and their students. And As Kdog suggested, if you talk to Yale’s Financial Aid Office and fax them Columbia’s offer, they might match it!