Top Law Schools

Hello,

While each and every student is an individual, if you had to generalize whar are the student cultures of NYU versus Columbia like in terms of:

1. Socioeconomic makeup of the students.

2. Career goals of the students.

3. Attitudes and personalities?

Thanks

Columbia is rumored to be highly competitive & comprised of a higher percentage of international students. NYU students tend to portray themselves as a bit more easygoing & co-operative. But, both are large law schools so typicalizations are likely to be rife with exceptions.

CanadianWolf wrote:Columbia is rumored to be highly competitive & comprised of a higher percentage of international students. NYU students tend to portray themselves as a bit more easygoing & co-operative. But, both are large law schools so typicalizations are likely to be rife with exceptions.

FWIW, everyone I talked to at CLS said that it wasn't competitive at all. Maybe they were being defensive? IDK. Anyhow, probably not that big of a difference; the inputs are near-identical.

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Culture is going to be essentially the same. I go to NYU and dated a girl from Columbia for awhile, so I spent quite a bit of time on both campuses. Any differences in "culture" are really just forced and manufactured by 0L's. You could take the whole student body of one and switch it around with the other, and no one would know the difference. The student bodies of both are large enough that you get the full spectrum of personalities, career aspirations, snottiness, etc.

Both schools have a large contingent of rich kids from the typical rich kid backgrounds. So of course both skew toward the higher end of the socio-economic spectrum. Career aspirations are largely going to skew toward NYC biglaw jobs, with a decent number of kids looking toward public interest (perhaps a bit more at NYU than at Columbia, but similar nonetheless). As for diversity, NYU has a very strong LLM program, so I am always hearing different languages as I walk through the halls. Not too many black folks, but I know many hispanics, Asians, and many European LLM students. Yet, while at Columbia, I saw just as much diversity while walking around.

As I said, most grounds for differentiation based on "culture" are really just manufactured by 0L's looking to make a tough decision a little bit easier. But having spent so much time in both schools, I can tell you that they are essentially interchangeable on the culture front. Try to find more concrete grounds for differentiation (i.e. location, specific programs/clinics that interest you, scholarship $$, etc.). The vast majority of people at both are entirely friendly, down to earth, and dare I say "cool" people.

doesn't matter

howlery wrote: Lots of hotties too btw .

A lot of the student body will have received admits at both schools, so essentially they are drawing on the same pool of people. I suppose it's true that anybody obsessed with status (Ivy/US News) will naturally self select to Columbia, and that liberal activist types might be inclined choose NYU... but still, the most of the people are probably interchangeable. For what its worth, despite all the hype about NYU students being friendlier, I had no problems making friends with Columbia students when I went down to visit.