@Marian Why would you say that Barnard students actually “preferred” Columbia? Because its admissions rate is lower? My D was turned off by Columbia’s core and by the fact that the students she over-nighted with at Columbia said they felt the administration was “disinterested” in undergraduates and told her that Barnard had better advising. Our D also really liked the fact that Barnard was a college for woman and has the Athena Leadership program and Athena Global Fellows program. She isn’t going to either but given the choice, she said she felt Barnard offered the best of both worlds.
“S wears topsiders and he is a sailor - but that is not what they wear on their feet when they are racing.”
Topsiders and boat shoes are great for cruising, but in sail racing they don’t work well, they don’t protect your feet from cold water and also aren’t that great with traction. I used to wear neoprene booties with the sailing gear I had, kept my feet warm even in November on the Hudson river in a 420. Doubt they would be considered preppy, to say the least lol.
With NYU, it is very true being in the city is an education, it was when I was there (though the Village was a lot more diverse back then, these days with how expensive the east, west and central village is, it definitely isn’t the same), I question the value of going there if it puts you into debt central. Guy who works for me, his son is going to NYU, the kid had the kind of stats to get into an ivy, but he wanted to go to NYU, and they are paying full freight, and to be honest I told him the kid would have done better at an Ivy, they are better with aid. From what I have heard from my network, what NYU does is they give aid when they decide some kid is absolutely stellar, for whatever reasons (for example, kid I heard of was whatever took over for the old westinghouse/intel science search a finalist, and got pretty much full ride, even though their family was upper middle class), same in TSOA, but when it comes to most students it seems either feast or famine, with a few feasts and a lot of famine. I would rather they spend their endowment on scholarships and aid to make it more affordable, rather than building huge apartment buildings and buying expensive housing for ‘star’ professors, it is one of the reasons I won’t give them money, I give money to the school my wife went to, because they kind of have taken over for what NYU once upon a time was, a decent school where a lot of the kids come from families where they are the first to go to college, where they made it so kids who worked could go there and so forth, which NYU pretty much abolished by the time I graduated. And yeah, NYU has a lot of very well off students, when I wandered into the bookstore with my wife a couple of years ago, you could tell.
@Scipio, that sounds like a great trip. Even though it was a business trip, somebody who goes on a trip like that can afford to walk out of a theater because the movie is bad. 
@musicprnt, I am taken aback by the wealth of the students’ parents that filters to the kids. (I am talking about Columbia and NYU). A couple of my friends’ kids have roomed or stayed at places owned by other students. The places would cost over $1.5 million. One kid was the daughter of a billionaire.
Some people are buying $1.5 million places like they are big screen televisions. “I wanted this place on the West Side so my dad bought it for me.”. 
I wouldn’t care so much, but my kid lives in NYC and these wealthy families are driving up the real estate prices. How is my kid going to buy a place? Why aren’t these wealthy familes parking more of their money in Panama?
NYC is the “it” place to buy real estate, it is amazing. Guy I work with was looking at a house in Brooklyn, it was a basic row house that needed some work on it, and it was like 1.4 million…A lot of it is driven by Chinese and Russians looking for place to park their wealth, there is a building on Park ave I can see from my office, it is like 1000 feet tall and looks like a gigantic concrete sore thumb, some of the apartments are like 50 million, and they expect it to be totally sold out.
Then,too, NYC has become an ‘it’ destination, has been for a while, cause mom and dad have decided if NYC is safe enough for chain restaurants and big box stores, most be just like home lol…so apartment prices in general have gone nuts, was just reading about buildings in the deep south bronx, one of the poorest areas in the US, with one bedrooms in some renovated buildings going for like 3k a month…it is amazing, to say the least.
Guess someone has that kind of money, I sure as heck don’t:)
@musicprnt @dstark If you think NYC is bad, try London. We live in NYC but when we visited London we were staggered. And they are talking about POUNDS, not dollars. Reminded me of Tokyo.
In NYC, people love to buy apartments.
In Northern California, people ask, “When are you going to move out of your apartment and buy a house?”.
Money from China is affecting SF real estate prices.
$1.4 M in the pricey parts of Brooklyn gets you a small fixer upper.
I’m now an NYU alum by the fact that they took over my alma mater and unilaterally deleted the existence of my school for a $100M donation from someone who had no connection with the school and is not even an engineer. There is no way I would ever give them any money. I’ll just tell them to enjoy the $100M.
Can you get something nice in Park Slope for under $1.4 million?
How much does it cost to get something nice?
I checked zillow, and $1.4 M will get you a 1BR with den, 1.5 bath apartment in Park Slope. Brownstones are in the $2-4M range.
My D is renting in Bushwick, very déclassé, for about $1600-1800 for a 3 bedroom. The LL doesn’t know about the fourth person living there.
My BIL is a realtor in NYC and is doing really well. He just moved into a 1.4 million dollar apartment in Williamsburg, 2 BR, lots of glass, little balcony, nice views of the east river, lower and midtown Manhattan, and 4 bridges. Very mod.
My real feeling…this is a first world discussion. At the end of the day…no one really needs to care about this.
Yup, Bushwick is where its at for the young, hip crowd. Williamsburg has even become too pricey and precious.
But how about all the folks who are getting gentrified out of their neighborhoods? Where do they go?
But we probably need another thread to discuss NYC real estate.
Well… We were discussing shoes…
@NoVADad99 :
If you are talking Brooklyn Poly, I got my master’s degree there, and yep, NYU gobbled it up. Actually, was kind of ironic, when NYU abandoned their uptown campus in the Bronx, their engineering school at the time (mid 70’s) merged with Poly:). Poly was a good school that served a real need in NYC, I wonder what NYU will do with it, if it will become equally pseudo elite.
@dstark: My friend who looked at the house was looking in Windsor Terrace, which I believe is near Park Slope…he basically gave up looking for a house because there simply was nothing there he could get into, is looking at apartments now. There are a lot of times I wish the neighborhood in the Bronx I had lived in hadn’t gone downhill, I would have bought it and lived there, it was so bloody convenient. I like where I live in the suburbs, but the house there had a lot of the things I have in the burbs (off street parking, garage, double lot so it had a nice yard), was close to so many things, 20 minutes to grand central on Metro North…but the neighborhood basically became unlivable, when you start hearing gunshots and night and cheap lawn furniture gets stolen, you know it isn’t there any more sigh
Hate to say it, but I’m on the edge of my seat waiting for the next real estate collapse and hoping it benefits our kids.
I am looking around in San Francisco. Ideal is a two family house. Out of budget at present. Even in budget, it makes me nervous. Who knows if they will stay put on the other side of the country from all the grandparents?
@doschicos those videos are hilarious.
About boat shoes . . . we called them topsiders mostly. I didn’t know what boat shoes were until I went to college. Lots of guys from Newport Beach. One became my best friend and Newport became my home away from home on weekends and breaks. That’s when I got into ocean sailing and moved there for a while after grad school. My friend bought a 34 foot sailboat and we’d sail to Catalina on weekends whenever we could. I eventually broke down and bought some topsiders - which I thought looked ridiculous when I was first exposed to them.
I had a sailboat growing up, but it was more like an over-sized bathtub with a sail and I was always barefoot. My father was one of ten kids and remembers having to wear his sister’s hand-me-down shoes to school one year. He took up boxing soon after.
@musicprnt Yes, I got my BSME from then Polytechnic Institute of NY (which came about when Brooklyn Polytechnic took over NYU Engineering when NYU got out of the engineering business.) I’m proud of the mostly down to earth nature of the students who came out of poly, and it’s definitely non-elitist. There will be a void for affordable, quality engineering education in the city. CUNY is about the only choice for those who can’t afford pricey schools.
Re the Bronx. I lived there in the 70s in Co-op City and then the Williamsbridge section off Allerton Ave. That was a nice, quiet neighborhood within walking distance to the subway with 2 family homes. And then there is the nice part of the borough in Riverdale, and the area by the Throgs Neck Bridge. The Bronx hasn’t experienced the gentrification the other boroughs are seeing. I hope for the sake of the people living there now it’ll never happen. But I doubt it.