Columbia University

If you’re comparing Dartmouth College’s Tuck School with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business your application strategy is simply to get into the school with the biggest brandname. The reason: These programs are as different from each other as night and day. The differences cover everything from geography and facilities to culture and curriculum. This is big versus small, city versus rural life, a single crammed outdated facility versus a world-class MBA complex, a highly competitive versus a cooperative culture, and a broad, expansive curriculum that can be tailored to numerous industries or disciplines versus a general management approach.

Columbia is all about New York and the awesome resources it routinely leverages from the capital of the world. Unlike Tuck, it also enters two MBA classes a year, in January for students who don’t need or want a summer internship, and in September for a more conventional full-time MBA schedule. The diversity of Columbia’s exceptional students is mind-boggling: In the Class of 2011, for example, are students who have interned at the White House, managed hedge funds, published books, produced TV shows and launched companies in the U.S. and abroad. The class includes an army ranger and recipient of the Bronze Star, the founder of the largest organic vegetable processing factory in northwestern China, a finalist on American Idol (we’re not kidding), and a three-time Grammy award-winning music producer.

Top Ten Reasons to Go to Dartmouth?

1. It’s one of the five best MBA programs in the world.
2. The MBA alumni network is arguably the best and most supportive of any business school.
3. You want a premium MBA experience at a school that is completely focused on the full-time, two-year MBA and not a host of other programs that detract from it.
4. You thrive in smaller, intimate settings.
5. You prefer a highly collaborative and supportive student culture.
6. You want to create important and enduring relationships with fellow students.
7. You want to create important and lasting relationships with faculty.
8. You want a general management perspective.
9. You like small towns and tend to dislike big cities.
10. You adore the outdoors.

Top Ten Reasons to Go to Columbia?

1. It’s one of the six best MBA programs in the world.
2. It’s all about location, location, location. That is, New York location.
3. You want a deep and thorough education, not merely in finance but a subset of it, such as investment management, private equity, value investing or something even more obscure.
4. You expect to work in New York and want to be part of an extremely strong alumni base in the city where every major company is populated with at least some key players who got their MBA ticket punched where you did.
5. You are highly competitive and want to go through a tough, competitive MBA program.
6. You thrive in a larger environment and enjoy being a smaller fish in a bigger pond.
7. You want to be part of an extremely diverse class, with lots of international exposure.
8. You don’t mind traffic, people congestion, overpriced housing, and putting up with the hassles of big city life.
9. You love big city life, or at least badly want to try it out, and you tend to dislike small towns in isolated places.
10. You root for the New York Yankees, love museums and Carnegie Hall.

The more detailed differences between Columbia and Dartmouth?

Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. Photo by John A. Byrne

Geography: Columbia Business School is the quintessential big city university. Its location in New York, the business, financial and media center of the world, brings the school massive benefits: a living laboratory of markets and businesses, an endless supply of well-qualified adjunct teachers, and more visiting executives who gravitate to its classrooms to speak and lecture. The school estimates that it gets more than 500 guest speakers a year on campus. That is a networking opportunity that is unique. “We have a big advantage being in New York City because there are so many opportunities for students to visit local alumni in their work offices and for alums to come back and coach students on campus,” says Ethan Hanabury, a senior associate dean at Columbia. He estimates that as many as 3,000 alums come back to the school each year for conferences, classes, recruiting sessions, and mentoring programs. There are few cities in the world that are as alive, exciting and dynamic than New York. The drawback to Columbia’s location is also obvious: As one student put it, “It’s easier to get a little lost in New York, to feel a little less rooted if you’re from outside the area, and to be a little more anonymous.” The social dynamic is completely different as well. Because Columbia MBAs rarely live together but are spread throughout the city, they’re far more likely to be more competitive with each other. It’s easier to stab someone in the back when you rarely see them outside of class. Dartmouth’s Tuck is on the other extreme: Hanover is the quintessential New England college town. It’s quaint, picture perfect after a fresh snowfall, and fairly isolated. You fly here into a tiny airport in West Lebanon, six miles south of Hanover. When the weather turns bad, you face a white-knuckle flight onto the short landing strip that’s carved into a mountainside. Sleepy Hanover rolls up the sidewalks pretty early, with little variety in restaurants and bars.  The Canoe Club, on Main St. in Hanover is pretty much it. Boston is a two-hour drive from the Tuck School.

Size: With a target class size of 240 students, the Tuck School serves up an “intimate scale” MBA program with one of the smallest total MBA entrollments of any elite school. The upshot: it’s generally easier to get “air time” in a class at Tuck without being a hog and it’s more likely your professor knows everyone in the class. The small size of the place certainly assures that every student knows each other. In fact, it’s almost close to impossible for someone not to have had a fellow student in a class or a club. “It’s like the old TV program ‘Cheers,’” says Tuck Professor Paul Argenti, who has also taught at Columbia. “Everybody knows your name. You can mold an incredible world when you take in only 240 students a class.” On the downside perhaps, everybody knows your business. In the September-entry class alone, Columbia brings in more than twice as many students, 554 full-time MBAs as well as another 121 Executive MBAs. Columbia’s total EMBA enrollment alone–650 students–is higher than Tuck’s full-time MBA program. Total full-time MBA enrollment at Tuck is only 510, versus Columbia’s 1,293.

Culture: The size and location of Dartmouth create a fairly unique culture and one that is the extreme opposite of Columbia. While cut-throat competition may be exaggerated at Columbia (it has been said that MBA students once hid books from classmates), it’s undeniably true that the Columbia environment is more competitive and less collaborative than Tuck. It’s a fact of life at a massive city school. A year ago, a graduating Columbia student penned an essay for the campus newspaper in which he  he bemoaned the lack of a supportive and encouraging culture. “There is no community at Columbia,” he wrote. “There is no sense of solidarity. There is no creative energy. Too many people out for themselves.” There’s more than some hyperbole in those comments, but they are directionally correct. The school’s reputation for having a sharp-elbowed culture was reinforced in 2010 when an email from the student Investment Banking Club leaked out. Addressed to first-year students, the email made it clear that some people were not playing nicely with each other: “Some of you have already managed to become notorious for their willingness to elbow their peers out of the circle around senior bankers and virtually attack the bankers with questions, thus preventing other students from networking and participating in the conversation…such behavior shows that you are aggressive and non-collegial, and therefore not a pleasant person to work 100-hour weeks with.”

In contrast, at Dartmouth a few years ago some recruiters told faculty that Tuckies were “too nice” and respectful of each other. Tuck profs have since notched up the competitiveness in the classroom to better prepare students for a real and often harsher world. Yet, the bonding that occurs at the Tuck School among students is second-to-none due to its size, the fact that most first-years reside on its compact B-school campus, and because of Hanover itself (there aren’t many places to disappear). Very close relationships are formed between students and faculty at Tuck for the same reasons. Tuckies are decidedly an outdoorsy bunch: in the winter, students are likely to engage in ice hockey matches, skiing, and ice skating; in the summer, they’re off hiking on Mount Moosilauke on the edge of the White Mountains National Forest, rowing and canoeing on the Connecticut River, or playing rugby and squash. Columbia’s culture is not nearly as tight-knit or outdoorsy, nor should you expect it to be that way.

Facilities: Unfortunately, Columbia Business School has the absolute worst facility of any prestige b-school. That’s no fault of the school’s leadership. For years, several deans have been trying to get a new world-class building to replace the 1960s-built Uris Hall, but politics and highly limited space on campus have made this a long, and difficult quest. Meantime, all of Columbia’s peers have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into new world-class complexes so the contrast between what Columbia has and everyone else is vast. Uris is an unattractive gray concrete slab of a building, over-crowded and sub-standard in every way. Truth is, even when the building opened in the early 1960s, it was considered so unattractive that architecture students picketed the structure’s dedication. No wonder the school’s elaborate website contains only a single photograph of the outside of Uris among numerous slideshows of the overall university campus and New York. It has been renovated, but has limited places to study and few classrooms. There is no business school residence hall. Instead, some b-school grads get to fight it out for the limited graduate housing with Columbia’s other schools. Half of the MBA classes, including the core, gets taught two blocks away from Uris at Warren Hall, a building on 115th St. shared with the university’s law school. Though the school has two other buildings, they are used for the Executive MBA and executive education programs. So all the action in the MBA program occurs in Uris and Warren on Columbia’s Morningside campus which runs from West 114th St. to West 120th St. between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave. This will change, perhaps by 2012, when the b-school is supposed to move to the university’s expanded campus, a 17-acre tract of land in West Harlem from Broadway to 12th St. between 125th and 133rd St. This new university campus won’t be fully built until 2030. All this is in stark contrast to Dartmouth’s Tuck School and its compellingly attractive mix of brick Georgian buildings and modern state-of-the-art brick and copper clad buildings. The Tuck campus is nicely compact: 11 connected buildings, most of them brand new or newly renovated. Stell Hall, with its beautiful cathedral ceiling, carved oak interior and welcoming fireplace, sits in contrast to the soaring glass atrium and massive granite hearth in the newly constructed Raether Hall. Both spaces–reflecting the old and the new–are among the most impressive faciliities of any business schools. Tuck’s three residence halls arguably make up the best MBA dormitory complex in the world. If you’re keeping count, it’s essentially one building at Columbia versus 11 at Dartmouth.

Teaching Methods: The case method is a core part of the curriculum at Tuck and Columbia. But both schools offer up a more varied way to learn with group projects, lectures, simulations and experiential learning. The more singificant difference may well be the increased accessibility of the faculty at Tuck given its size and location. Tuck boasts one of the lowest faculty-to-student ratios of any business school so profs have far more time here to spend with students than teachers do at most other schools. Faculty often have students over for dinner in their homes, something that is much less likely to occur at a big city school such as Columbia, Chicago, Harvard, or Wharton.

Program Focus: The Tuck program has a general management focus. While you can dive deeper into finance, marketing, or entrepreneurship, among other areas, the dive isn’t nearly as deep as it would be at Columbia which also has more places to dive. This is especially true in finance and economics, the largest division of Columbia Business School, which offers nearly half the school’s courses. There’s also a private equity focus and a “value investing” focus, the latter with a curriculum of eight courses alone, from “Legends in Value Investing” to “Distressed Value Investing.” A “media” focus boasts 26 courses at Columbia’s schools of business, film, law, journalism, international and public affairs, and arts and sciences. You can even do deep dives on such specialized areas as “social enterprise” or “healthare and pharmaceutical management.” With a full-time faculty of 150 plus 50 more adjunct professors versus Tuck’s 47 professors and instructors, Columbia offers an unusual breadth and diversity of courses. The school has more than 130 electives, though there are more than 4,000 graduate-level classes from the university’s other graduate and professional schools. Dartmouth has 81 courses in its business catalog. If you want to focus on a more narrow specialty, you’re more likely to be disappointed at Dartmouth. So the sacrifice you pay at Tuck for the intimacy and bonding is that there are far fewer options among electives and less opportunity to specialize in a specific area of study.

On-Campus Recruiting: If you want to work on Wall Street, an investment management shop, or a global financial services firm, a Columbia MBA is a near peerless ticket for entry. Citicorp, Goldman Sachs, Chase-Morgan Stanley overflow with Columbia grads. So was Lehman Brothers before it went down. All the major MBA employers recruit at the school so there are no shortages of opportunity on the job front. Obviously, Tuck attracts as many prestige MBA hiring organizations as Columbia, but not the overall number of recruiters. On the other hand, your access to on-campus recruiters at Tuck can sometimes be better because you won’t have to compete with hundreds of students for conversations during recruiting events or for slots on an interview schedule.

Alumni Network: Columbia alumni are fully entrenched in the financial, media, and business world of New York which essentially means that alums are a powerful and influential bunch. Of the 38,000 living alums, a figure that includes EMBAs, you can find a Columbia connection anywhere in the world. How helpful and supportive they’ll be is another question. That’s less of a reflection on the graduates than it is on the all-across-town MBA experience that Columbia offers. It’s more of a hit-or-miss proposition than it would be if you have a Tuck degree. Over the years, BusinessWeek surveys of MBA graduates show that Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth boast the strongest alumni networks of any business schools in the world. Dartmouth’s 8,600 living MBA alums may be a fraction of Columbia’s but you would be surprised at the deep commitment and cohesiveness of the Tuck alumni body.  For our money, this is the best MBA alumni network in the world. How can we make such a claim? We’ll quote that old cliche about how money speaks and talk is cheap. The proof is in the percentage of alums who routinely donate money to the school. Tuck leads all business schools by a huge margin, with an alumni participation rate of 66.7% in its most recent fund-raising campaign–and Tuck has had 60%-plus percent participation for the past 25 years. No other top business school comes close to 50%, while the average of Tuck’s peer schools come in at less than 25%. Put another way, the Tuck participation rate is three times the average of the top 20 business schools. It demonstrates the alumni’s remarkable loyalty to and relationship with the school and its students. “If someone wants to go to San Diego and looks in our database and finds 20 alums there, he or she can get return emails from 19 of them in one day,” says Paul Danos, dean of the Tuck School. “There’s a comfort to have that network for the rest of your life.” The second largest number of Dartmouth alums, about 1,000, reside in New York.

Rankings:

Dartmouth beats Columbia in three of the five major rankings, in the Forbes, U.S. News, and The Economist surveys, doing considerably better than the best business school in New York. In 2010, Dartmouth surprised everyone by getting ranked number two by The Economist. Columbia wins over Tuck in the BusinessWeek and Financial Times surveys. Dartmouth’s surprisingly poor showing in the BusinessWeek ranking is in part due to the small size of the program which hurts the school in BusinessWeek’s recruiter poll. The P&Q rank–which factors into consideration all the major rankings weighted by their individual authority–gives Dartmouth the edge at number five with Columbia right behind it at number six. It’s important to note, however, that Chicago and Wharton, both schools with stellar programs in finance, rank better than Columbia. These are the up-to-date rankings from each ranking organization.

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Historical Rankings by BusinessWeek:

Over the years, Columbia Business School has performed slightly better than the Tuck School in the BusinessWeek rankings. Yet, it has never done as well as Dartmouth did in the inaugural 1988 survey when Tuck placed third and Columbia placed a disappointing 14th. Tuck’s weakest performance in the BW survey was in 2000 when it his 16th, while Columbia’s poorest showing was in 1988 when it drew that rank of 14th. Best showing for Columbia occurred in 1994 and 1996 when BusinessWeek ranked Columbia sixth. It’s worth remembering that both schools have a difficult time in this customer satisfaction survey: It’s hard to keep students and recruiters happy in New York City, given the less-than-adequate facilities at Columbia and all the distractions in New York. Dartmouth, on the other hand, is disadvantaged in the BusinessWeek survey due to its very small size. The methodology tends to favor larger schools that attract greater numbers of corporate recruiters who hire MBAs.

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Historical Rankings by The Financial Times:

Unlike BusinessWeek’s rankings, The Financial Times includes business schools from all over the world. So the FT is ranking both Columbia and Dartmouth against such places as London Business School, which ranked number one in this survey in 2010 and 2009, and INSEAD, which ranked fifth these last two years. Columbia has done much better than Dartmouth in the 11 surveys charted below, ranking third five times. Columbia’s highest rank from the FT was second in 2007. It’s lowest: a current rank of sixth. Dartmouth, on the other hand, has never had a higher rank than 7 in 2005 and has been ranked as low as 15th twice and 13th on three occasions, including the past two consecutive years. Tuck’s showing in the Financial Times survey is a reflection of the methodology’s attempt to measure what the newspaper calls “the diversity and international reach” of the school. Among other things, the FT takes into account what it calls “international mobility,” “international experience,” and “international board,” factors that favor European schools where countries are not much larger than most states in the U.S.

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Admissions:

Both Tuck and Columbia attract exceptional talent to their schools and are highly selective as a result. Dartmouth turns down 8 of every 10 applicants, and has an acceptance rate of just 18.8%. Columbia is even more selective, mainly because its location in New York City is highly desirable. Columbia sends offer letters to just 14.9% of its applicants, making it the sixth most selective business school in the world. That is a world of difference from where Columbia was in the early 1990s when it was accepting 47% of its applicants in 1992. Dartmouth’s average GMAT score for the Class of 2011 is 712 versus Columbia’s 713 average. * Estimate.

Enrollment:

Columbia is one of the largest two-year, full-time MBA programs in the world, with a total enrollment of nearly 1,300 students–not including more than 200 additional Executive MBAs. That’s more than twice the size of Dartmouth’s total enrollment of 510. Dartmouth is known for its intimate and close-knit community environment, while Columbia–as a New York City school–is an extreme opposite. Columbia is only slightly more international–merely by two percentage points which is surprising given its location. Yet there is great diversity within Columbia’s international student population: the Class of 2011, for example, colectively speaks more than 50 languages, including Sanskrit, Tagalog, Yoruba and Serbian. The numbers for women, international and minority students are for the Class of 2011.

Poets & Quants:

The poets seem to win out at Tuck, where 26% of the incoming class has humanities undergraduate degrees vs. 20% at Columbia. The larger difference appears to be students with engineering and math degrees, an area where you might not have expected Tuck to be as strong as it is. Tuck says 27% of its students in the Class of 2011 have such degrees compared to only 13% at Columbia.

Jobs and Pay:

The financial meltdown of 2009 led to a disaster of an MBA recruiting season at Columbia’s Business School. Nearly four of every ten graduating students in the Class of 2009 was without a job at commencement. Columbia was more severely impacted because it traditionally feeds Wall Street and the big banks which were largely on life support at the time. Dartmouth did much better, though nothing to brag about, because nearly a third of its class didn’t have jobs when they graduated. Grads from both schools fared much better three months after commencement, yet Columbia sill significantly trailed Tuck. Starting pay for Tuckies was more than $5,000 more than at Columbia and is also third best, after only Stanford and Harvard. The estimates of median pay over a full career come from a study by PayScale done for BusinessWeek and do not include stock options or equity stakes by entrepreneurs. Columbia grads did better than Dartmouth here by a couple hundred thousand dollars. In fact, Columbia MBAs were third behind Harvard and Wharton. Dartmouth came in fifth on this measurement, just below Stanford.